The right’s response to Hitlergate is to give Trump’s authoritarianism advance permission.
Nearly half of the Cabinet-level officials who served in Donald Trump’s first term have refused to endorse his reelection. Many have spoken out against him, at deep personal and political risk. Their descriptions all revolve around familiar themes: Trump is unfit to lead a democratic government; he either cannot understand or simply refuses to accept distinctions between his personal interests and those of the state; he admires dictators and wishes to emulate their methods.
Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and almost every president in history, has had zero high-level officials from her Cabinet describe her as fascistic or otherwise fundamentally unfit for high office. The number of Trump officials who have made this claim about him is extraordinary.
The recent flare-up over revelations by former chief of staff John Kelly that Trump repeatedly expressed a desire for his generals to display the level of fealty that Trump believed was given by Adolf Hitler’s forced them to acknowledge the issue. The responses they’ve offered have been revealing.
The reactions I’m collecting here are representative of the conservative movement’s impulse to dismiss or deflect from the overwhelming evidence that Trump is considered dangerous by many officials he appointed to office.
Of course, what makes the new claims about Trump distinctive is that they come from Republicans who have not made similar statements about Reagan or systemic racism. But this is a useful way to categorize criticism of Trump as coming from the opposing side and therefore not requiring substantive rebuttal.
James Antle, another Examiner columnist, similarly argues that the existence of Republicans who consider Trump a dangerous authoritarian is evidence that they are plotting to steal the election.
David Harsanyi, writing in the Washington Examiner, argues that Kelly is unreliable and likely to lie because he believes Trump is authoritarian:
The reasoning here is that anybody who believes Trump is authoritarian has a sufficient motive to lie about him to prevent his election, which makes any testimony they offer about his authoritarianism inherently suspect. This syllogism does offer a useful way to discard massive amounts of damning testimony against Trump. It does, however, elide the rather obvious question of why Kelly and so many other Trump veterans arrived at their belief that he is a dangerous authoritarian in the first place.
Most conservatives do not directly advocate these iron-fisted measures. Instead, they deflect. But when they deflect, they are revealing in advance that they have no intention of objecting seriously to any authoritarian moves Trump might make. They have decided he is on their team. The justifications they offer in reaction to undeniable evidence of his authoritarian ambitions is a preview of how they will act if and when the real thing occurs.