The Morning After
The United States Supreme Court recently anointed the first King of America. His Majesty Joe I was raised above the rule of law by the grant of immunity from prosecution for illegal acts carried out as ‘official functions’ of the President’s executive duties. It now appears that Joe Biden could, if he so decreed, imprison, say, Donald Trump as an enemy of the people. On national security grounds he could suspend habeas corpus, as has happened during wartime, incarcerate a list of political foes, suspend Congress and dispense favours to friends, while diverting public revenues into his personal accounts and those of his family. He could then set about restructuring the formal institutions of government, starting with the judiciary, and moving on to the civil service and armed forces. He wouldn’t even have to work very hard, just borrow the Project 2025 playbook helpfully supplied by the Heritage Foundation. The November presidential election this year could be indefinitely delayed. Recalcitrant Supreme Court Justices could be replaced, sacked or worse.
Such political moves have been the staple diet of dictators through the centuries. Plato long ago argued that democracies as a form of government were inherently unstable and temporary affairs, prone to swing between mob rule and autocracy. There are plenty of recent and current examples of this happening. Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary and the recently thwarted move to dismantle Polish democracy are fresh to the eye. Zimbabwe’s history under Robert Mugabe is also fresh. This latter case demonstrates the unfortunate tendency of dictators to live long lives and stay in power unless and until a rival forcibly removes them.
Adolph Hitler invented the gold standard for demolishing democracy. A few weeks after being appointed Chancellor he had a Nazi dominated Reichstag, denuded of other parties, pass an Enabling Act that effectively made him dictator for life, and not just a day.
It would indeed be a delicious irony if Biden got his retaliation in first and despatched Trump thanks to the decisions of the three associate Supreme Court Justices that Trump appointed. But, of course, Biden won’t ‘do a Trump’. He has passed the nomination to his Vice-President Kamala Harris and will serve out his term and await the outcome of the election to be held in less than four months’ time.
What will the morning after the 5th of November this year bring? If Trump wins, Biden will become the lamest of lame ducks until the inauguration on 20th January next year. His political allies and many public officials will be making arrangements to be elsewhere. Emigration will appeal to many. Steve Bannon, recently released from prison will be leading the cry to defenestrate a long list of Trump enemies. Trump’s cronies will be furiously jockeying for positions in the new world. America’s enemies will be in party mood, anticipating new opportunities to capitalise on the chaos and Trump’s inadequate grasp of global affairs and economic realities.
On the other hand, if Harris wins, the chaos will turn inward. Trump has already signalled that he will only accept the outcome of the election if he wins. Losing will unleash his MAGA supporters in a frenzy of rage, creating an environment of social discord and violence not experienced since the Civil War. It is unclear if a re-elected Democrat would be able to count on the armed forces to quell the unrest without bringing out the militias in armed resistance, creating a new civil war. Trump’s torrent of violent political rhetoric almost ended his candidacy and life. A lone gunman toting an assault style rifle loosed off a volley of shots, one of which took off a piece of Trump’s ear. An inch to the left and we would be in a very different world today. But Trump was lucky. In fact, Trump has been riding a veritable wave of good fortune, most recently, the dismissal of one of three federal inditements held over his head. And here’s the thing. Dictators are lucky. Hitler survived multiple assassination attempts. Survival cements in the authoritarian mind that destiny is with them. Trump was lucky in a double sense. He survived with a flesh wound. And he could play the hero, holding his fist high as he was carried away.
The massive arsenal of weapons of close destruction held across America creates a clear and present danger. A defeated Trump could call on a renegade military force to turn its guns on the President and his successor. One weak hurdle stands in the way: the constitutional fact that the military currently swear allegiance not to the President or a candidate but to defending the US Constitution. But Trump and his allies have amply demonstrated a contempt for constitutional niceties.
However, Trump’s run appears to have peaked. His campaign has been wrong-footed by Harris replacing Biden and the Supreme Court’s refusal to stay sentencing in September on his New York State conviction in the hush money case. Jack Smith’s federal case on the January 6thinsurrection charges has also been reactivated, though not in time for trial before the election.
This raises the stakes for Trump. If on September 18th he is sentence to gaol for up to four months, probably suspended until after the election, he will redouble efforts to win at all costs, in order to be in a position to have the federal charges dropped and to impose massive pressure on the New York jurisdiction to do likewise or at least to suspend the sentence from being carried out during his White House tenure. The latter question he has left open with thoughts of overriding the two-term limit.
On a personal note, recently I met a perfectly nice American during a holiday in Europe. He came from a small town in Texas. I asked him if he thought Trump would win in November. He said — “Yes. If the election is fair.” This puzzled me. Federal elections are organised at the state level in America. Most of the states currently have Republican administrations in place. Why, I mused, would a red state be unfair to Trump? I kept my thoughts to myself. He was such a nice man. But if this level of cognitive dissonance is commonplace among voters like him, what price for a sensible outcome and what hope for the world’s first modern democracy?
How, on earth did we get to this point? The answer has deep historic roots as well as very recent drivers. The American republic has never been a full-on representative democracy. Created after a revolt to escape the fiscal clutches of a distant English King, the hybrid autocracy- democracy that is the United States was carefully crafted by a group of slave-owning Virginian landowners and New York and Pennsylvanian moneyed interests. This was a system of, by and for the white ruling class. The last thing they wanted was a system of representative democracy that enfranchised all citizens, not even all male citizens. As in the direct democracies of the ancient world, women, slaves and foreigners were excluded from political participation.
The result was an unwieldy compromise with a series of supposed checks and balances that were intended to prevent any of the following: mob rule, domination of the small by the large states, enforcement of an established religion, arbitrary incarceration and property dispossession, emancipation of slaves, and the rise of a dictator. Despite entreaties, George Washington resisted the attempt to draft him as President-for-life. Alexander Hamilton, for one appeared to have favoured an elected king. Today’s ultra-partisan divide in the US is testing this compromise in a way not seen for 150 years, with the possible exception of developments in the 1930s around the conflicts sparked by the New Deal and person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Supreme Court immunity ruling may be both the fulfilment of the founding fathers’ patrician utopia and the death of the first modern democracy. Compulsory religion in schools; arrest without trial; punitive fines of political enemies; a national ban on abortion; repudiation of international alliances and conventions; reintroduced racial segregation; regressive tax ‘reform’; the rule of militias. Trump has appealed to ‘Christians’ to come out en- masse and vote for the ‘last time’. In short, the complete negation of what generations of Americans and many others around the world thought the country was all about.
The next 100 days of the campaign are pregnant with dire possibilities. The level of political violence lurks ever-present (and not just in the US (witness the urban riots orchestrated by extreme right wing groups triggered by the shocking murder of children in Southport, England this week). One recent assassination attempt has occurred already. Arrests have recently been made, based on social media threats to candidates and prominent officials. A nightmare scenario sees both Biden and Harris killed before the election, resulting in the Executive power passing to the majority leader in the House of Representative, Trump lackey, Mike Johnson. What price US democracy, then?
Whatever happens later this year, the morning of the 6th of November is bound to be one of those moments in time that we who wake on that day will long remember.