From Roger Fitch and our friends down under..

 

Another Bonaparte takes the throne 

Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Justinian in Donald Trump, Roger Fitch Esq, US Presidential election, US politics

The Second Coming of Trump ... A circus of corruption and revenge ... Rewards for the "losers" ... Assembling the infrastruction of authoritarianism ... DoJ cases up for "negotiation" ... The knavery of Louis Napoleon ... Parallels aplenty ... Roger Fitch files from Washington 

"Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint, and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues. The result is a radical form of political action that gives a central governing role to 'bad' men who enjoy provoking the outraged indignation of those incapable of their own similarly bold acts of defiance" - Damon Linker, Notes from the Middleground

"[A]s Trump mounts his next assault on good government and decency, there will be too many misdeeds to follow. There won't be enough journalists to cover all his villainy and its consequences - neither at the local nor national levels. The media industry has been decimated in the past two decades, with a sharp decline in news reporters on the beat. Having fewer watchdogs allows grifters, miscreants, and outright crooks to get away with wrongdoing" - David Corn, Mother Jones

"This nation ... has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln…" - Ex parte Milligan (1866)

The Capitol Rotunda has seen a lot: a break-in and riot (January 6, 2021), Jimmy Carter's lying in state (January 7-8, 2025), and on January 20, the re-inauguration of the antithesis of the anti-corruption Carter: a cruel and vengeful, openly-corrupt, fraud-convicted criminal whose fresh offences began immediately, more here.

Days before, the Special Counsel's damning report into the 2021 election interference found a federal jury would have convicted Trump (already a state felon) but for his fortuitous election win. 

While peddling swearing-in schlock, the venal president-elect was showered with more than $200 million in corporate gratuities and anticipatory tribute. Donors were doubtless encouraged by the supreme court's relaxed new treatment of bribery and grant of near-absolute criminal immunity to presidents, and Trump's record of liberally issuing pardons.  

Trump coining his own meme currency

Trump is busy recruiting accomplices. As an initial matter, he doesn't believe self-dealing is wrong, or that bribery should be punished; in Trump's dystopia, crime pays.

Past transgressors will be redeemed, scandals forgotten. There will be rewards and reputational rehabilitation for assorted rogues: shady businessmen and financiers, needy developers, ethically-adaptable lawyers and recently-jailed loyalists. 

Trump distains "losers", yet as someone now convicted and sentenced for 34 counts of NY State felony fraud, he's unquestionably a "loser" himself. Perhaps out of solidarity, he has nominated an abundance of other losers: Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, all men and women who lost elections to Democrats.

Some are wildly unqualified (a DEI hire Defence Secretary), the rest suspicious: multi-billionaires, corporate lobbyists, supporters of crypto-currency (i.e, money) laundering; conflict-laden industrialists (Elon Musk); Christian nationalists (Israel Ambassador-designate Mike Huckabee); family relations (the Trump daughters' fathers-in-law); crack-brained zealots (RFK Jr and Dr Oz, keen to disrupt health and medicine).  

Hegseth: sexual abuser and nominee for Defence Secretary

A few are diplomatic affronts to countries Trump scorns: a disbarred ex-convict for ambassador to France and a cast-off girlfriend of son Don for Greece.

Trump's most important appointments, however, are to what the Russians call "power ministries", those  with  legal and coercive capacity: in the US, the Justice Department, Defence Department, FBI, and intelligence community. 

As the Atlantic observed:

"Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution ... If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it." 

Nominees have missions to obstruct (Billy Long, IRS), subvert (Kari Lake,Voice of America) or destroy (Kash Patel at the FBI) their agencies. Or exploit. At Justice, the lobbyist and substantial Trump Media investor, AG Pam Bondi, inherits 250 cases against 200 corporations, now negotiable for personal/Party advantage. 

The world's richest man is to lead a new scam, a Department of Government Efficiency. Elon Musk wants big tax cuts for the rich, paid for with the entitlements of the less fortunate. The far-right, fascist-friendly Musk, with countless conflicts of interest, wants DOGE to "slash" (some, not his) "government spending". 

With a reported $277 million investment in Trump, the rich bully Musk calls the shots, threatening, gangster-like, to ruin anyone who opposes him, Congress members included. 

The Nation has a guide to the "movers and influencers" (evil advisers) in the new Trump administration. 

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The Donald Trump phenomenon has historical analogies, e.g, the 1892 re-election of a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, the only other president to regain office after losing it. Unlike Trump, Cleveland was honest, a corruption-fighter. His second term was a party disaster.

Harvard philosopher Peter Gordon, writing in the Boston Review, was reminded instead of the French Emperor Napoleon III (1808-1873). In 1848, Louis Bonaparte, the great Napoleon's nephew, was elected the first (and last) President of France's Second Republic. Limited to one four-year term, Louis, like Trump, clung to office unconstitutionally. He seized power by force (unlike Trump, successfully), and in 1852 declared himself Emperor; he ruled until 1870. 

Louis Napoleon: an inspirational figure for Trump

Louis and Donald have other parallels. As Karl Marx argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Louis exploited a break-down in the class system. He, too, relied on a basket of deplorables:

"This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat who ... rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally ... conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery."

Gordon comments:

"Marx glimpsed something different ... Bonapartism was not a political movement that expressed the interests of a particular class; it was a movement born from the dissolution of class, the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest that grow ever more powerful as the realm of the symbolic takes on a life of its own ..."

Only this, Gordon says, "can explain why modern forms of right-wing populism have such an uncanny and free-floating quality that they seem to survive with no other content than the fever dream of political solidarity itself. Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of 'the leader' and 'the people,' filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community."