opinion

Opinion: Trump’s imperial presidency is a throwback to a greedier, pernicious age

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His attempts to bully and exploit the weak hark back to an era when the US emulated the worst aspects of the British empire

By Simon Tisdall

Donald Trump’s imperial presidency is a tawdry, threadbare affair. The emperor has no clothes to cloak his counterfeit rule. Lacking crown and robes, he resorts to vulgar ties and baseball caps. His throne is but a bully pulpit, his palace a pokey, whitewashed house, his courtiers mere common hacks. His royal edicts – executive orders – are judicially contested. And while he rages like Lear, his critics are publicly crucified or thrown to the lions at Fox News.

Yet for all his crudely plebeian ordinariness, a parvenu imperialism is Trump’s global offer, his trademark deal and most heinous crime. He peddles it against the tide of history and all human experience, as if invasion, genocide, racial inequality, economic exploitation and cultural conquest had never been tried before. If it wasn’t clear already, it is now. He wants to rule the world.

Trump’s menacing claims to Canada, Panama and Greenland revive the elitist fantasies of Elon Musk’s grandfather and Technocracy Inc, a 1930s rightwing populist movement that sought to unite North and Central America under US suzerainty – the “Technate”. The mindset feeding such pretensions is rooted deep in the national psyche. It’s a mix of Monroe doctrine, “manifest destiny” and the white man’s burden. It’s evil, it’s pernicious, and it’s back.

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America was its own worst enemy. Now we are our own best hope.

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Writer and scholar Sarah Kendzior argues freedom is about what it means to be human, so we must protect it at all costs.

One of the most common refrains when a democracy collapses into an autocracy is that no one could have seen it coming.

The motivation behind this myth is the absolution of the powerful. After all, what cannot be predicted cannot be prevented, and therefore the failure of officials to safeguard our freedoms should be forgiven. This is the story we hear as Donald Trump approaches a possible second term and the U.S. plunges into unprecedented turmoil.

The premise, of course, is a lie.

Freedom is about what it means to be human, and to be recognized and treated by others as such.

What “No one saw it coming” tells you is who the powerful consider to be “no one.” “No one” are the multitude of marginalized Americans who warned in 2016 that their rights had always been on the line and would be even more so now. “No one” are the people who knew that a future American autocracy was possible because their ancestors had been subject to past ones: slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, and other forms of legal subjugation that were destroyed only through decades of defiant demands for their eradication.

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