Alan Zendell, September 10, 2024

There are many things dictators and wannabe-dictators do to stay in power. The most common is the use of political arrests. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all do it, and Hungary, which is still technically a democracy almost matches them. In 2020, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban forced a law through his parliament making it illegal to speak out against the government. In 2023, the same Orban forced the same parliament to pass a law making it illegal for any Hungarian to be involved with a foreign power attempting to influence Hungarian policy. Both laws were excuses to imprison anyone Orban considered a threat to him.

Russia and China have never been shy about incarcerating their opponents to keep them quiet, and if that doesn’t work, they tend to turn up dead in the tradition of Josef Stalin who is considered responsible for killing more than eight million of his own people. North Korea seems to have a tradition that murdering a relative is the most effective form of governmental succession. Iran’s intolerance for opposition figures explains why the families of thousands of people connected to the former Shah’s royal family now reside in Europe and North America.

If it’s not obvious where this is headed, look at what Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro did to remain in power. He declared victory in last July’s presidential election, although independent vote recounts showed that he had lost to opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez by a significant margin. With the possibility of massive unrest or civil war looming, Gonzalez had to be rescued from Venezuela by Spain where he was granted asylum.

If this doesn’t remind you of Donald Trump, we don’t live on the same planet. In 2016, Trump instigated crowds to chant, “Lock her up!” in response to the highly exaggerated Hillary Clinton email scandal. Someone on Clinton’s staff had clearly used poor judgment in allowing her to use her personal email account for government business, as her counterpart in George W. Bush’s cabinet, Colin Powell had admitted doing.

What Clinton inadvertently did wasn’t a crime, and compared to Trump claiming he had a right to retain classified documents after leaving office in clear violation of federal law, it was a trivial matter. By contrast, when the crowd at one of Kamala Harris’s rallies chanted, “Lock Him Up” over the federal indictments and convictions Trump faces, she quieted the crowd and said, “No, we don’t do that.”

Trump believes that the President should have the power to lock up anyone he perceives as a political enemy (if and only if he is the president.) This one minute video shows him insisting that Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all be imprisoned, and includes a 2016 clip in which he raises the horrifying possibility that if Clinton defeated him we might have a sitting president under criminal indictment who would have to stand trial.

In recent days, Trump has expanded his threats. He says he plans to cast a wide net and prosecute everyone he perceives as disloyal to him. As he has demonstrated repeatedly, Trump makes no distinction between supporting the Constitution and the president and personal loyalty to him.

People used to refer to President Reagan as “teflon Reagan” because none of the scandals or missteps in his administration ever hurt him politically. But Reagan, like Harry Truman, understood that the buck stopped with him, and he always stood up and accepted responsibility for his actions and those of his subordinates. He understood that Americans are forgiving of people who admit their errors. But Trump is neither Ronald Reagan nor a principled Conservative. In the fight for the minds of the several thousand undecided voters in battleground states, I’m betting those voters will see the difference.

Trump has benefitted from a different form of teflon coating than Reagan’s. Known everywhere as a serial liar, and somehow, not paying a price for it, he now winks at us when he tells us his plans to become a dictator and tear up the Constitution, as though it’s all just a big joke. But it’s not. As the majority of his former cabinet and top military leaders, including his ultra-Conservative Vice President, Mike Pence have assured us, Trump’s plans to undermine our democracy aren’t lies. He means every word of it, and he is unfit to ever wield power again.

As tonight’s debate looms, for the sake of our future, I hope Kamala Harris is able to drive the point home. As Hillary Clinton advised her, the surest way to defeat Trump is to give him enough rope to self-destruct, and I believe Harris will.