Newsweek on Donald Trump: What, him, a worry? (photo: Jabin Botsford/Washington Post/Getty)
Yes, there is still a Newsweek magazine, and it says not to worry about Donald Trump.
“Trump isn’t Hitler. He isn’t a fascist either,” the magazine’s Matthew Cooper (3/16/16) assures us:
The unspectacular truth is that a Trump presidency would probably be marked by the quotidian work of so many other presidents—trying to sell Congress and the public on proposals while fighting off not only a culture of protest but also the usual swarm of lobbyists who kill any interesting idea with ads and donations…. Remember Schoolhouse Rock? Trump is no match for the American political system, with its three branches of government….
Could Trump blow up those legendary checks and balances and make America a fascist state? Oh, please…. Trump’s more likely to end up like Jimmy Carter—a poor craftsman of legislation and a crushing disappointment to his supporters.
Why will Trump be like Carter? Because “since World War II, only Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have left office with high approval numbers.” Well, OK then!
If that comparison isn’t reassuring enough, Cooper has more:
Critics should allow that he could be like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—a political novice and ideologically flexible Republican whom some California voters feared, yet who turned out to be way more tepid than the Terminator.
Cooper even seems to find reassurance in Trump’s safely alphabetizable name, concluding:
It’s more than likely Trump would wind up being just another president on the alphabetical roll call, nestled between the memorable Truman and the utterly forgettable John Tyler, distinguished more by his hue, his bullying and his encouragement of other bullies than by any lasting damage done to a republic that has endured far worse.
Cooper’s blithe disinterest in any actual victims of Trump’s “bullying and…encouragement of other bullies” is as concerning as his basic argument: that people who worry about a Trump presidency just don’t understand how Washington works. “To actually accomplish even modest legislative goals, let alone become a 21st-century führer, is beyond the mogul’s ken.” If Trump wanted to reinstate torture, for example, “he’d have to get past Sen. John McCain, chair of the Armed Services Committee.” Trump’s “my-way-or-the-highway proclivities…would be worrisome if America were Bolivia and not an enduring democracy.” And his
displays of bigotry during the primary…are abhorrent, but they don’t put the America on a fast track toward the Third Reich—not unless you believe Congress, business, the armed forces, the judiciary and so on are all willing to start setting up internment camps.
But it seems like it’s Cooper who doesn’t know how Washington works—or is pretending not to. (He’s probably most famous as a reporter for helping Karl Rove and Scooter Libby expose Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer in retaliation for her husband’s whistleblowing on WMD deception.) When George W. Bush wanted to torture, he didn’t need to change any law; he just had his lawyers change the definition of torture, a maneuver that many in corporate media went along with uncomplainingly.
As for “setting up internment camps”—isn’t Guantanamo an internment camp? The armed forces, unsurprisingly, obeyed their commander in chief when ordered to set it up. Congress’s role has mainly been to resist any moves toward dismantling it—and to assert, in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, that the president has the legal right to imprison people without trial. (The Supreme Court for its part responded to that law by declining to review its constitutionality.)
A question Newsweek (6/23/14) asked that President Trump would no doubt love to find out the answer to.
Cooper does note that “when it comes to a president’s powers as commander in chief, Trump would have a lot of discretion.” But he doesn’t acknowledge what that has come to mean in the age of the “War on Terror.” In 2012, the New York Times (5/29/12) revealed that Obama meets weekly with advisers to decide who to put on the “kill list”—a list of targets for drone assassination. These lists can and do include American citizens, whom according to the Justice Department Obama has the right to kill without trial—as Newsweek (6/23/14) has itself reported.
Torture, detention without trial, assassination—not to mention an unprecedented surveillance apparatus: President Trump, like any president henceforth, would start off his administration with all the tools he would need to establish an authoritarian regime.
And any impulse to do so would no doubt be facilitated by an elite press corps ready to wave it all away as so much sound and fury, posing no possible threat.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.