Defeating Trump Isn’t Enough

The Supreme Court tariff decision is not much reason to cheer.

—

Before you start the post! I am offering a sale today; it’s 40% off, $30/yr.

This newsletter survives on your subscriptions—and so do I, increasingly, as AI and media’s rightward shift eat freelance opportunities for left writers like me. Please consider taking advantage of this sale and coming onboard so I can continue to write for you.

—

The Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs last week, calling bullshit on his claim that there was some sort of national emergency justifying massive tax increases and international chaos. It took the court a year, and three justices (Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh) affirmed once again that they think Trump should be able to do anything he wants. But it was an example of checks and balances sort of working, and an example of Republicans—even notably two Trump-appointed Republicans in Barrett and Gorsuch—affirming that they are not in fact just Trump rubber stamps.

Trump losses are Trump losses, and in general I try to point to them as signs that Trump is a losing loser and we can win. In this case, though, I have trouble feeling especially jubilant. Instead, every time I think about the court and their decisions, pro or anti Trump, I’m reminded of the extent to which Trump has exacerbated and supercharged our fascism problem. Trump did not create this nightmare, and it is unlikely to disappear, or even dissipate, once he is gone. If we want to defeat Trumpism, we have to do a lot more than just defeating Trump—and it’s unclear our institutions are up to the second, much less the first.

Trump is deposed, hurrah

Trump is a creature of (gutter) impulse, and many of his plans and schemes are opposed by most other Republicans. His adoration of tariffs is one of those idiosyncratic enthusiasms; Republican business interests hate them, and the conservative jurists are enthusiastically devoted to business interests. So they struck down the tariffs.

Any refusal of fealty among Republicans is a good thing, obviously, and it’s important that there are parts of the GOP that are not willing to bend the knee entirely. When Trump leaves office (as he will have to at some point) it seems likely that his successors in the Republican party will move away from unilateral spasmodic massive tariffs with no clear policy goal beyond demonstrating that tariffs are nifty.

It would be nice to extrapolate from that to other policies. The next Republican president probably won’t try to seize control of the Kennedy center, right? They won’t try to invade Greenland or Canada; they probably won’t continue Trump’s lonely war on windmills. They may not attack the fed when the fed tries to avoid hyperinflation. Maybe, maybe they’ll even reverse some of the US AID cuts, which have already killed some 800,000 people and are expected to result in 14 million deaths by 2030. They might well decide that plague is bad, chuck RFK jr. into the bear-gut-filled ditch he crawled out of, and cease the senseless, vicious, horrifying attack on vaccines and public health infrastructure. They probably wouldn’t be quite so all in on hiding the Epstein files, either.

So sure, there is reason to believe that Trumpism without Trump will look somewhat different, and that, if given a chance, some Republican leaders would roll back, or at least stop pushing forwards, some of the awful things Trump does.

That’s of limited comfort, though, for two interrelated reasons.

Republicans are on board with fascism

The first reason that Trumpism will not end with Trump is that the core of Trumpism is fascism…and the GOP as a whole has demonstrated that it loves fascism, with or without Trump.

Fascism is a circular project; hatred of marginalized people is used to justify authoritarianism, and then authoritarianism is used to pursue violent assaults on marginalized people. The Republicans on the Supreme Court and elsewhere have made it clear that, while they may quibble about tariffs, they are on board with the twin goals of gutting democracy and gutting marginalized people.

Congressional Republicans have advanced the fascist war on the poor and the disabled by eliminating ACA health care subsidies, while at the state level the GOP has launched an orgy of genocidal legislation aimed at eliminating trans people. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has kneecapped the Voting Rights Act, to enable the disenfranchisement of Black people; it has eliminated reproductive freedom to ensure the subjugation of women; it has greenlit racist profiling to facilitate terror campaigns against brown people and immigrants.

The Republicans majority also placed the president above the law so that he need not concern himself with possible prosecution as he trampled the rights of marginalized people and partisan foes. This points to the second reason that getting rid of Trump won’t save us from fascism—which is that Trump has shaped the party in his image.

It’s all Trump

Presidents always have a powerful effect on their parties. Obama, for example, made health care a core issue for Democrats, made Ds much more willing to nominate people who aren’t white men, and solidified their failed strategy of trying to outcop the GOP on immigration. And of course, presidents reshape other institutions—as Trump has done with the Supreme Court, which he has seeded with a Christofascist majority that seems likely to last for decades, or really forever, absent drastic procedural steps.

Authoritarian parties are even more defined by their leaders than democratic ones, and the GOP has become more and more a party stamped with the orange image of their grotesque Fuhrer. This is apparent in displays of personal fealty—as when Mike Johnson praised Trump for his innovative fecal fantasies, or when his cabinet engages in competitive groveling. It’s also apparent in the way his policy priorities have won out—advancing global fascism rather than challenging Putin, for example, or ending foreign aid rather than continuing George W. Bush’s anti HIV efforts.

But Trump’s ascendance is perhaps most evident in the way the party has embraced the unitary executive, shoveling more and more authority at the authoritarian whose main policy priority is consolidating more and more authority. Congressional Republicans have largely shrugged and/or cheered as Trump has seized the power of the purse to defund programs he dislikes and create his own slush funds to advance his own priorities (and pocketbook). The Supreme Court, again, has placed Trump above the law and generally given him wide latitude to attack the Constitution.

While Republicans do occasionally push back against Trump, then, they have done the opposite of push back against his most dangerous tendencies—especially his drive to make the presidency into a dictatorship.

Long live the Trump

The next Republican leader will not pursue all of Trump’s policies. But it is quite likely that the next Republican leader will pursue fascism and will do so in large part by insisting that they have the power to unilaterally shred the Constitution and ignore Congress and the Supreme Court as they see fit. A different Republican leader would probably have different hobby-horses, but there’s good reason to believe that they would pursue those horses with an analogous disregard for law or Constitutionality, and with a similar partisan vindictiveness. Tariffs may not be part of the next Republican president’s agenda, but cults of personality and concentration camps sure seem like they will be.

This is why Biden’s strategy of simply beating Trump and the Republicans at the ballot box forever is not a sufficient plan to defeat fascism. Coordinated, determined on the ground resistance, as in Minneapolis, is vital. But so is political action. Democrats need to come into office determined not just to roll us back to a pre Trump era, but to transform the institutions that made the rise of Trump possible.

That means abolishing ICE, dismantling DHS, and rescinding every Trump executive order on day 1. And it also has to mean transforming Congress and the Supreme Court—abolishing the filibuster, enfranchising Washington DC (and other territories if they wish), and expanding the court so that it cannot horde and advance its own Trump-without-tariffs vision for generations. Otherwise, we will never be a democracy, or anything like one, and Trump, for all his losses along the way, will have won.