The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
—Winston Churchill
Take Trump’s threats seriously. Believe that he intends to do what he has said. Understand what he is by comparing him to other despots in history.
A clear-eyed understanding of the psychology of President Trump and villains like him.
While Trump, with his gaudy lies and disdain for facts, is a uniquely American demagogue, he is bred from the same strain as every other demagogue. Here is the basic recipe for every demagogue: a bottomless hunger to further his own power, uncanny knowledge of how to manipulate his followers, media savvy, and a lack of human empathy. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for his autobiography The Art of the Deal, called Trump a sociopath. The mark of a sociopath is a fluid mastery of lying. Tony Schwartz described Trump by saying “he’s a living black hole!” A black hole using empty promises to lure victims reminds me of the creature No-Face from Miyazaki’s anime masterpiece Spirited Away. No-Face is a hungry ghost who offers people whatever they want, but when they approach him he swallows them up and they become part of the monster.
Trump always has plenty of praise for the “leadership” of bloody dictators, despots, and demagogues. He has praised war criminals like Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein. If Hitler were alive today, Trump would no doubt praise his “strong leadership style.” These are the kinds of people Trump looks up to and admires. These are dictators who have slaughtered their own people by the thousands. They are his role models.
The psychology of this sort of ruler is called fascism. We humans are not always rational creatures, and because of this we can fall prey to making irrational, fear-driven decisions. Fascism happens when demagogues take power by fear. A demagogue is one who knows how to stoke those fears in crowds, and then promises they alone can assuage them. It’s been done a thousand times throughout history. Spoiler alert: the results are not pretty.
Fascism is a far-right movement led by a dictator; it is democracy’s only natural predator. Here is a list of the fourteen characteristics of fascist leadership, according to political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt, who looked at the common traits of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet. This list was written in 2003, well before there was even a glimmer of the Trump presidency on the horizon (Trump was busy stiffing the people he hired to design his golf clubhouse.) Check off the traits that match Trump.
The Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism:
That was a pretty easy pop quiz, wasn’t it? Nationalism, check, disdain for human rights, check, scapegoating, sexism, check, check. Trump clearly meets the criteria of a fascist. He is not really a Republican, but something else entirely, a parasite that hijacked the Republican Party. Understanding how fascist dictators operate is the first step to understanding how to defeat one. Consider one of the only people Trump has consistently praised, besides himself.
Vladimir Putin is as dangerous, cold-hearted, and cunning as a shark. He honed his style of covert and unscrupulous power by rising through the ranks of the KGB. Putin is as at home in the world of organized crime as he is in global politics. His long-term goal is to make Russia a superpower again by undermining Western democracy, which he sees as a natural and historic enemy to his Russian oligarchy. Putin wants our democracy to fail. He has been in power in one form or another for over twenty-six years, and he is playing a long-term game. For Putin, helping to get Trump elected was just one move in an ongoing game of global chess. Putin is shrewd and sneaky, the tactics he used to influence the 2016 US election (by directing Russian hackers to hack the DNC and release stolen information to WikiLeaks, and by flooding Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet with fake news via Russian bots and blogs) are the same tricks of subterfuge and disinformation he has used in other places, like the Ukraine, and that he will continue to use in Europe and in future American elections. He is openly admired by Trump. Putin is ruthless. To Putin there is no line between military warfare and warfare by propaganda, blackmail, lies, and intimidation. He is rumored to secretly be the richest man in the world. Outspoken Russian critics of Putin have been beaten, poisoned, shot, pushed out of windows, and imprisoned.
The fascist worldview is that it’s the nation versus everybody else, and all the problems of the nation are blamed on a scapegoat, some minority group. It’s easier to blame somebody else than to come up with real solutions. It is essentially an ideology about being “strong” by being a bully. Researchers who study human psychology have determined that a certain percentage of people have an authoritarian personality type. They are drawn to strongman leadership. This personality type likes rules and rulers; it is basically a reaction to fear, to feeling afraid, and a lack of control in the world. It is a mindset that says—“I’m scared, I want a strong leader to take control, to tell me what to do, so I don’t have to worry.” It is the opposite of a mindset of courage and feeling like you as an individual can take care of yourself. It is a remnant from tribal days, when humans lived in small groups that would often fight each other. When people feel afraid, scared, threatened, there is a part of human nature that looks for an authoritarian leader to take control. That basic human psychology is still with us; when it operates on the large scale of a nation, it leads to fascism.
People are more willing to give up their freedom when they are fearful. Fear works the same way whether there is really something to be afraid of or not. The demagogue understands this and creates a bogeyman out of a minority group that the demagogue can “save” his followers from. For Trump it is Muslims and Mexicans, and for Hitler it was the Jews.
In times of perceived crisis, some people are willing to hand over the reins of free thought and let someone else take power and make all the decisions. The stronger the group mentality is, the more people shut down their rational thinking. Trump appeals directly to people’s basest emotions: fear, racism, and the instinctual need to feel a part of a group.
Trump skips past all reason and works directly on the animal brain, the instincts of the group mentality, using racism and xenophobia to make people feel afraid, and then to promise them that he can “make everything better.” The inevitable strategy of the tyrant is to get people scared enough that they are willing to trade freedom for a false sense of security. For this reason dangers are played up, exaggerated, and even faked. For Hitler this was the Reichstag fire, which he used as an excuse to jail and silence his opponents.
Some may think comparing Trump to Hitler, to Putin, to Pinochet, is alarmist, but to take that stance is to ignore all of the authoritarian actions Trump has already carried out. During his first year, President Trump’s first presidential decree was the unconstitutional Muslim ban—barring travelers from Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Chad. He also ruthlessly cut off the DACA program, marking eight hundred thousand young Dreamers who were brought to the US as children for deportation. His justification for attacking immigrants is grounded in racism; he has compared refugees to “vomit” and ranted about immigrants to his cabinet, saying Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and Nigerians visiting America would never “go back to their huts.” Meanwhile Attorney General Jeff Sessions has worked to make the justice system more draconian, stripping federal prosecutors of their discretion to decide what punishment fits the crime and instead mandating the maximum sentences for all cases. The Center for Disease Control issued a list of banned words—barring the use of “fetus,” “science-based,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity.” The EPA has worked to purge references to climate change. The Department of Justice also halted a program created after the police brutality of Ferguson, and police departments across the country are once again being allowed to stockpile military weapons—bayonets, grenade launchers, unmanned aerial vehicles, camouflaged armor and armored vehicles—for use against civilians. The military and the CIA have also eliminated measures designed to protect civilians from drone strikes.
While the government under Trump has become more authoritarian and xenophobic in word and deed, it has simultaneously become much more corrupt and opaque. The first bill Trump signed was to rescind the Dodd-Frank anti-corruption rule, so that oil and mining companies no longer have to disclose payments to foreign governments. Meanwhile the labor department is no longer enforcing overtime payment for employees, and will no longer fight against pay discrimination by age, race, or gender. The FCC abolished net neutrality, ignoring the demands of the American constituents in favor of the demands of big business. Government agencies across the board have changed their websites to share less information with the public. Similarly, one of the first changes in White House policy was to stop keeping logs of White House visitors—hiding who has direct access to the president. Perhaps most frightening of all, the Republican establishment has happily gone along with Trump, turning a blind eye to his authoritarian overreach and mounting evidence of collusion with Russia in order to pass their tax cuts for the rich.
There is plenty to be alarmed about. The warning signs are blatant. There were plenty of people who thought that being afraid of the Third Reich was alarmist at the time, and it was only after World War II ended that the full extent of the Holocaust was understood.
Hitler also rose to power legally. He was elected after he had made a name for himself speaking to packed audiences, and promising to make Germany great again. The message is hauntingly familiar: that the nation must rise to greatness “again,” and the obstacle to that is racial minorities. This call to “make America great again” is a promise to go back to whiter, more racist times, when it was socially acceptable to be racist, to treat blacks, and women, and Hispanics, and Asians, as second-class citizens.
Authoritarian leaders, by nature, always press to increase their hold on power. The political story of Hitler illustrates this psychology of creeping authoritarianism in action. Adolf Hitler was elected to chancellor (the equivalent of our presidency) in 1933. He then fought to achieve full control over Germany’s legislative and executive branches of government. He claimed he would use democratic elections, but soon he was using blackmail against his opponents, jailing his enemies, and intimidating all who opposed him, until they had either given up or been hauled away to concentration camps. Fascists fight as dirty as they can. Once they have won more power, they use it to fight dirtier.
Hitler was still treated as just a regular politician until it was too late. The Holocaust killed eleven million people. The Nazis slaughtered Jews, Soviet prisoners, Polish people, as well as homosexuals, the disabled, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and trade unionists. But even Hitler didn’t start out by openly proposing the Holocaust, he started by saying he would make Germany great again, and by scapegoating minorities for the nation’s problems.
During his rise to power Hitler was not taken seriously, he was seen by many Germans as a buffoon. When Hitler made the Jewish people wear yellow stars for identification (they didn’t have computer databases back then), most people thought that it would just end there. As he ramped up the racism that lead to the Holocaust, people thought, “oh, it’s just words” and “this can’t be happening, no need to be alarmist.” The hugeness of the evil that he unleashed was so large, many people at the time were not able to see it coming.
We should take the things Trump says seriously. He is writing his dark motives into action and legislation on a daily basis. He has said he would like to bomb the shit out of the Middle East. He has said he would like to jail his opponents. He has said he would bring back torture. He has said he will deport millions and build a wall. He has said that he would shut down mosques, force all American Muslims to register in a national database, and put Muslims in camps.
In the first months of his presidency Trump resolved to end the DACA program, thereby threatening eight hundred thousand children with deportation from the country where they have grown up. These are real kids, children who came to America before their sixteenth birthday, many as infants—real lives, real families will be hurt by this. He vocally came out in support of neo-Nazis and white nationalists, equating them with activists, after the white supremacists rampaged in Charlottesville, Virginia, with swastikas, Confederate flags, and violence fueled by racial hatred. He has continued to deny climate change and backed out of the Paris climate accord, even as the forests of the West Coast burned and the people of Texas and Florida had their homes destroyed by hurricanes and floods.
While the psychology of power-hungry autocrats is always the same, the outcome is shaped by what holds them in check—and depends on whether society pushes back and speaks out against their power, or not.
America has good things going for it in the struggle to survive the Trump presidency: we have the Constitution, the judicial system, freedom of the press, and free speech. The will of the majority opposes him. Resistance is the balancing force against the tyranny of evil men.