Is Trump an autocrat, or does he just play one on TV? - Bai WaPo [View all]

With all the radical dismantling going on inside President Donald Trump’s Cabinet departments, maybe it’s myopic to fixate on what’s outside them. And yet I can’t stop thinking about the giant banners of Trump that keep appearing on the facades of our national buildings.

Maybe you’ve seen the banner hanging at the Labor Department, which — like one that appeared in the spring on the Agriculture building — features a barn-size Trump glowering over the capital, accompanied by the words “American Workers FIRST.” It reminds me of the banners of Saddam Hussein that I saw in Baghdad in the late 1990s, the military beret replaced, in this case, by an elaborate comb-over.

(snip)

What I find so alarming about this, despite its being mostly about style and atmospherics, is the lack of alarm generally. If there was one thing we all used to agree on as Americans, even as the country started to fracture, it’s that our nation was founded in opposition to exactly this concept: the fusing of national interest with the will of a single leader and his family line. We led the enlightened world away from the dark age of monarchy. We fought the cruel tyranny of absolutism in Europe and in the Communist bloc.

(snip)

Would we, the majority of voting Americans, really mind so much a capital rebranded for Trump, the governing mansion covered in gold and the boulevards lined with his likeness, if he brought back the factories and expelled all the immigrants? It’s no longer a trivial question. Because, for all his pomp and bluster, Trump has opened the door to a passage that I assumed to be walled off forever. And even if he isn’t ruthless or enterprising enough to become the first real American strongman, my fear is this: Maybe there’s someone watching him who is.


https://wapo.st/3VEcDmv

free