Rolling Stone magazine has published a deranged rant promising an end to democracy and a shift to dictatorship if Americans elect Donald Trump in November.
Stooping to the most pathetic of scare tactics, Rolling Stone writers Tim Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng insist that a Trump presidency will usher in death by firing squads, relentless lawfare against his political opponents, and the beginning of American tyranny.
If Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris this November, “America will encounter a Trump unbound, a man whose darkest impulses will not be checked by ‘adults in the room’ — creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the American experiment,” the authors declare in their 5000-word screed.
The unhinged article compares J.D. Vance to Benito Mussolini, Trump’s immigration platform to the Japanese internment during World War II, and Trump himself to “Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte.”
In the Rolling Stone scenario, the half or more of the country that will vote Trump in November are either crazed fiends or gullible nitwits who understand nothing, something akin to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 characterization of Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables.”
“Trump has positioned himself as an avatar of a collective revenge fantasy for his followers,” the authors write.
One cannot help but wonder of the writers’ opinion of their own readers, if they think that a string of absurd threats will scare them into voting for Kamala Harris.
The basic thesis of the article — if indeed it has a thesis — is that the first Trump term was relatively benign because there were people around him to rein in his “darkest ambitions,” but such a counterweight will not be present if he is reelected.
“The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” it states, citing Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”
A second-term Trump would “supercharge fossil-fuel production,” “pull every lever of power within his grasp,” and pursue autocratic power to satisfy his “authoritarian ambition,” the article contends.
“Regaining the White House would put a naked abuse of power at Trump’s fingertips,” it argues, including coercion of the Justice Department.
Reading between the lines, the authors seem to be warning that if elected, Trump would seek to do what President Joe Biden has actually done, namely weaponize federal agencies to harass his adversaries, engage in open lawfare against opponents, and swell the powers of the executive branch.
Curiously, the writers warn that Trump would reenter the Oval Office with “powers that have been supercharged by the ultraconservative Supreme Court,” a bizarre assertion, since the Court has systematically sought to roll back executive overreach, most notably by overturning its previous ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It’s not just a change of methods, it’s a change of political system — a vast expansion of the powers of the executive, so that Trump will be able to rule as an autocrat,” the article asserts, citing Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall.
Strongmen like Trump “all denigrate the press and the judiciary as corrupt, because that’s their enemy,” says Ben-Ghiat, who seems unaware of the actual corruption of the mainstream press (of which Rolling Stone is a part) and members of the judiciary.
The article even goes so far as to compare Trump to David Koresh of the Branch Davidian cult, and his supporters to Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
What the article really seems to reveal is the hysteria of the Democratic left over the prospect of a Trump win in November, which appears more likely by the day.
The title of the piece is telling: “Worst-Case Scenario: What If Trump Wins?”
