Trump and Musk have Miscalculated

How a key failure in understanding and judgement will be their undoing.

Note to readers: I realize this is a departure from my usual writing on science and public health but it is hard to stay inside the lines these days and Trump has made everything, including science, political. Allow me to indulge.

Demonize minorities, embrace misinformation and propaganda, threaten livelihood of dissenters, demand fealty… It’s an old playbook. Hitler wrote it and Trump and the insidious, dark money forces that put him in power have followed it in goose step. They have also demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of both historical Germany and modern America. That willful ignorance will be their undoing.

We are not the Weimar Republic

As a democracy, Germany was barely an adolescent when Hitler rose to power. It had been just 14 years since the fall of the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic had been a disaster. By the time Hindenberg appointed him Chancellor in 1933, humiliation and economic collapse had defined Germany’s entire, brief experience with democracy. Autocracy didn’t sound so bad.

The same could be said of Putin, Trump’s favorite living dictator. In 2000, when a newly-elected Putin sent tax police to raid a TV station critical of the Kremlin, Russia’s experiment in democracy had lasted just eight painful years.. Like Hitler, Putin rode in on a wave of discontent over a reduced, humiliated Russia and economic collapse.

The scale of economic collapse in both Russia and Germany prior to the rise of fascism boggles the mind. Russia saw five years at more than 200% inflation after the fall of the communist dictatorship. Germany effectively invented hyperinflation at 10,000% per year until they were printing 50 trillion mark notes. Much as Trump has tried to manufacture the illusion of a similar collapse in the US, all the alternative facts in the world can’t make it so. Under Biden, inflation peaked at 9% and had dropped to 3% by the time Trump was elected.

A fifty trillion Mark note (Billionen translates as trillion.).

Democracy is in our bones

More importantly, for the US, democracy has not been a short-lived experiment. There is no nostalgia for the glories of autocracy. The libertarianism of Trump’s base and Musk’s professed free speech absolutism are fundamentally incompatible with the precepts of fascism. Of course, his most extreme supporters will remain comfortable with the cognitive dissonance implicit in holding these values while supporting Trump-Musk’s assault on free speech and the media, but polls already suggest those nearer the middle are not. Democracy is baked into our bones.

We are, in fact, not one democracy, but fifty. And those democracies are amalgamations of local democracies. States from Maine and California are already expressing defiance. In his usual, thin-skinned way, Trump is going after them. But states’ rights are the foundation of modern conservatism. And states and local democracies control their own elections. Attacking them will not end well for him.

We have yet to take to the streets. Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with outrage has caught us unprepared. But he and his co-conspirators should not mistake our relative silence for acquiescence. Those who voted against him have only strengthened their resolve to oppose him. Those in the middle are watching in horror and wondering what they voted for. As the damage from his actions hits more and more Americans, his support will collapse.

Trump and Musk have not heard drumbeats of resistance, but neither does the dumb ox hear the stalking tiger. We are strong and powerful and resolved. We are awaiting our opportunity to strike. When it begins, it will be ferocious and relentless. It will come at them with the accumulating force of our collective outrage. Few of their supporters outside of Putin and his thugs long for autocracy.

We long for an America that defines patriotism based on what we stand for rather than who we stand on.

What we do long for is a truly great America: one that is a beacon for democracy around the world, one that demonstrates its strength, not by bullying the weak, but by empowering them, that measures its wealth and wisdom by its generosity and understanding, that supports genuine freedom and not the absurdist buzzword it has become under Trump, that defines patriotism based on what we stand for rather than who we stand on. They cannot silence us. Their support is soft because it is based on deceit. I believe in my fellow Americans. Those taken in by Trump will see who he really is and, when they do, their rage will be driven by a sense of betrayal. There is one thing all Americans have agreed on for 250 years.

We hate kings.

Trump has not made us great again, he has made us a selfish embarrassment of a nation in his ghastly image. After he is done diminishing America, Trump’s vacuous slogan will take on a new meaning. In the wasteland he makes of American honor, we will all need to come together to Make America Great Again.