The Fisking of Kagan 123

My favorite author of Trump-happily-ever-after election propaganda is now Robert Kagan of the Washington Post.  You may ask yourself, “Has photog gone mad?  Isn’t Robert Kagan part of the neo-con Kagan family that runs the Biden State Department?”  Why yes, he is.  But he’s just written a column that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of any Trump voter who reads it.  I’ll demonstrate.

“Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

How’s that for a start?

“In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence. The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates, much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.”

Pretty good right?

“The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor.”

Nice.

“Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into the unknown. …

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”

That is true.

“Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.”

You went with the Hitler gambit?  I knew you would.

“I mention all this only to answer one simple question: Can Trump win the election? The answer, unless something radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting panic about its prospects.”

Finally!

“If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.”

Ooh!  Tell me more!

…

Note: Long exposition about how Trump will not be constrained by Congress, the Judiciary or even by Heaven itself.  Blah, blah, blah.  Suffice it say Caesar at the Rubicon.

…

“Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.”

Alright, the good stuff.

“It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.”

Ooh.  That’s pretty exciting.  What else you got?

“The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.”

Gosh, it sounds so good.  Can it be true?

“Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course, already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.”

Yes! Yes!  He must!

“This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.”

No! No! Dictatorship, we must have dictatorship!

“Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?”

No! No!  We want the Asteroid!

“We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.”

Yes! Yes! Whimper!

And there’s a whole lot more of this.  Thousands and thousands of words.  And all of it unintentionally hilarious.  Oh, if only life could imitate this Kagan art.  What a wonderful world it would be.  Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi wearing those old timey striped prison outfits and General Milley in front of firing squad for his treasonous words to the Chinese military.  But alas, the fevered imaginings of Kagan are just that.  There will be no pogroms.  No elected or career government officials will go to the wall.  In fact, we’ll be hard-pressed to get anything done in the unlikely case that Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025.

But I still want to thank Mr. Kagan for this wonderful bit of fantasy.  I needed a good laugh.  Reading his overheated imaginings was a hoot.  Donald Trump as a combination of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Joseph Stalin was wonderful.  He even managed to get the asteroid from the movie Armageddon into the act.  And poor Bruce Willis can’t help us now.

But all good things must come to an end.  We can’t forget that in the real-world people are still in prison awaiting trial for something that happened three years ago when they trespassed in a government building like every other Lefty has done for decades.  We still have Dementia Joe crushing our lives under a blizzard of stupid directives that make everything from food to rent too expensive to afford.

And we still live in a country where fake news and fake elections mean fake democracy is the reality we live under.  So, all of this sound and fury about a man who basically is just a middle of the road New York Republican who is trying to keep our globalist elite from dispossessing the middle class and replacing them with tens of millions of third world refugees is a little bit ridiculous.  All it shows is that actual democracy cannot be allowed to happen in Barack Obama’s America.

But it’s good to see that Democrats can somehow manage to pretend that somehow, they are the ones being persecuted.  Well done, Bob, you creep.