“But stupidity is not enough,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. The facts must be eliminated. “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” Followers must “forget that one has ever believed the contrary”. Memory must be erased. “This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” The past, like the facts, must be reinvented. “For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”
Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”
At the very moment Trump delivered his remarks highlighting his campaign for a dictatorship, the Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming his motive. He reported that Trump, as president, had rebuked the US military command, stating: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Then, Trump’s former chief of staff, the former general John Kelly, stepped from behind the curtain in an interview with the New York Times. “Certainly,” he said, “the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly added, the Times wrote, that “in his opinion, Mr Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law”.
The warning of the generals against Trump’s fascism is unanimous among those who have served most closely with him. The former chair of the joint chiefs, the retired general Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward, in his new book War, that Trump was “fascist to the core”. Trump’s secretary of defense, the former general James Mattis, emailed Woodward to express his agreement with Milley that Trump was “the most dangerous person ever”, and “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.” It’s Defcon 1.
In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”
Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.
An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole.
But Trump’s presidency was a rehearsal for fascism. Quite apart from his record of kleptocracy, allegedly pervasive corruption and obstructions of justice, pardons of criminal associates and dangling of pardons to insure their silence, contempt for the law, maniacal obsession with Hitler, who “did some good things”, scorn for military service (“suckers” and “losers”), worship of foreign tyrants, congenital lying, paranoid conspiracy mongering, disdain for climate science, willful neglect of public health, ignoring warnings and spreading falsehoods in the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, the organization and incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and indifference to the near-assassination of his vice-president by a mob he had unleashed (“So what?”), Trump systematically abused the Department of Justice to investigate, harass and prosecute his “enemies within”. Trump’s current rage is hardly a new threat. In a second term he intends to smash through the constraints that inhibited him in his first.
The Just Security website of the New York University School of Law reports: “The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president.” Just Security distilled “A Dozen Times Trump Pushed to Prosecute His Perceived Enemies”, but there were many more.
“The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the justice department,” Trump said on 2 November 2017. “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.”
Trump’s years in office showed him on a learning curve of fascism. He saw democracy as a plot against him that he had to break down. Like a hotel burglar jimmying door locks, through trial and error he discovered how to turn the keys. He pushed and prodded looking for weaknesses and loopholes. He located the places where he encountered resistance. He felt for the limits and how to go beyond them. He found out who would deter him and who would enable him. He calculated the price of everyone. He discovered those whose craven ambition would serve him. He realized that ideology was a tool he could use like a crowbar. He absorbed the lessons of crime and punishment in order to commit greater crimes without punishment. His administration was a school for the making of a fascist.
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Trump was frustrated that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself so that he could not kill the former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign connections to the Russians. The Mueller report stated: “According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton …”
After publicly attacking the justice department for not investigating “Crooked Hillary”, Trump succeeded in intimidating Sessions into naming a special counsel to investigate the already debunked conspiracy theory that Uranium One, a Canadian company, made a deal with the Russians in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. A grand jury was empaneled, issued subpoenas and prosecutors concluded there was no “there” there. But it was not until two years later that the case was closed without any charges on 15 January 2021, five days before Trump left office.
Trump blamed the FBI for the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign. His paranoia morphed into ever widening conspiracy theories about the “deep state”. He fired the FBI director, James Comey, for not exonerating him. He forced the firing of the deputy director, Andrew McCabe, on 16 March 2018, two days before McCabe’s scheduled retirement. The justice department opened an investigation into whether McCabe illegally leaked information about the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation probes. The federal judge overseeing the McCabe case, Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, stated: “I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road …”
The case against McCabe was dropped without charges on 14 February 2020, and his back pay and pension were restored.
On 20 May 2018, Trump demanded a justice department investigation into a “deep state” conspiracy theory going all the way up to Barack Obama, in which Trump stated that “the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes” – “Spygate”. An investigation was opened. But on 11 December 2019, the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued a report stating that, contrary to Trump’s assertions, there was “no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any [confidential human sources] within the Trump campaign … ”
On 23 August 2018, Trump declared that his appointment of Sessions was a terrible mistake. In response, Sessions issued a statement: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” The next day Trump tweeted a long list of his people he designated as enemies whom he demanded Session should investigate. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!” On 8 November, he forced Sessions to resign. The new attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, a compliant mid-level rightwing operative from Iowa, was a stand-in until William Barr took over in February 2019.
Barr, who had been attorney general under George HW Bush, was advertised as a conservative Republican institutionalist. He knew how to game the system for the gamester in the interest of his own game. The cultural reactionary, on the board of the reactionary Opus Dei organization’s Washington DC front, the Catholic Information Center, believed he was using the depraved Trump in a crusade for the restoration of traditional morality. More importantly, Trump was the useful idiot to stock the federal bench with Federalist Society-stamped judges. Leonard Leo, chair of the Federalist Society, served on the Opus Dei group’s board with Barr.
Barr was the adult in the room who became Trump’s enabler, enforcer and teacher. On 24 March 2019, Barr issued a letter pre-empting the release of the full Mueller report so that he could to distort its conclusions and present those distortions as truthful. He wrote that Trump’s campaign had not “conspired or coordinated” with the Russians, that Trump had fully cooperated with the investigation and that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice. He redacted and withheld from the public key sections of the report. “Mueller’s core premise – that the President acts ‘corruptly’ if he attempts to influence a proceeding in which his own conduct is being scrutinized – is untenable,” Barr wrote to justify his cover-up.
The US House of Representatives held Barr in contempt for withholding the full report. It revealed that Trump had committed 10 indictable obstructions of justice to keep evidence and witnesses from investigators, which neither Barr nor his Biden-appointed successor, Merrick Garland, ever prosecuted. The report identified 272 contacts between Trump agents and Russian operatives, not one of which Trump reported to the FBI. Judge Walton ruled that Barr had “distorted” and been “misleading” about the contents of the report. On 30 September 2020, he decided Barr had violated federal law and that the redacted sections should be released, which they were, only days before the 2020 election. But Barr was not about to open a prosecution of himself.
The bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, released on 18 August 2020, disclosed literally hundreds of instances of Trump campaign involvement with Russian operations. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, regularly shared “sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy” with a Russian intelligence officer, Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he had a long relationship on behalf of Russian interests in Ukraine.
One of Trump’s obstructions, cited by Mueller, was his dangling of pardons for Manafort, who was convicted of numerous tax and financial frauds, and for Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser convicted for lying to the FBI and not registering as a foreign agent. Trump was enticing them not to testify. Both stonewalled, and both received pardons.
After Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime dirty trickster, was convicted of lying to the Congress and obstructing justice about acting as a conduit for Russian intelligence through WikiLeaks on hacked Clinton campaign documents, among other murky things, and sentenced to nine years in prison, Trump expressed outrage: “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them.” Barr instantly intervened to reduce the sentence. The four prosecutors on the case resigned in protest.
Trump tweeted: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!” Just before leaving office Trump would commute Stone’s sentence.
Meanwhile, as soon as Barr assumed his post he revived the “Spygate” conspiracy theory, declared “spying did occur” and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate what Trump called an “attempted coup” against him. Trump denounced the Mueller investigation as “illegal”: “Everything about it was crooked – every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.”
Barr appointed John Durham, the former US attorney for Connecticut, who spent four years trying to prove Trump’s accusation that the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Russian interference was a “hoax”, as Trump claimed. Durham’s chief prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, quit because she thought he was running a political operation and that Barr had “violated DoJ guidelines”. Durham interviewed nearly 500 witnesses, including Hillary Clinton, to determine “whether the conduct of these individuals or entities [with ties to the Clinton campaign] constituted a federal offense and whether admissible evidence would be sufficient to obtain a conviction for such an offense”.
Durham’s two high-profile cases, against the attorney Michael Sussmann and the Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, resulted in embarrassing acquittals. Durham wound up convicting an FBI lawyer for altering an email in his effort to shortcut a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, for which he received probation and community service. Durham ended his snark hunt by criticizing the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference as “seriously flawed”, but without anything of consequence to show. Trump tweeted: “WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed …”
For two years, Barr waged a war against Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, a Republican, who indicted Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on campaign finance charges for paying hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels to silence her about a sexual relationship with Trump. Trump clearly appeared in the indictment as Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1. Barr pressured Berman to reopen the case in order to toss it out. Berman refused.
Barr then tried to strong-arm Berman at Trump’s instigation into indicting the former secretary of state John Kerry for trying to keep alive the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated during the Obama administration. Berman refused. Barr pushed Berman to indict Greg Craig, Obama’s former legal counsel, on flimsy charges of not registering as a foreign agent, in order to have a prominent Democrat’s scalp. Barr sent a deputy to tell Berman he should prosecute Craig to “even things out” before the election. Again, Berman refused.
Barr moved the Craig case to the District of Columbia, where he leveraged an indictment. On 4 September 2019, the jury acquitted Craig in less than five hours. “Throughout my tenure as US attorney,” Berman wrote in a memoir, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining – in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired. I walked this tightrope for two and a half years. Eventually, the rope snapped.”
Berman was conducting a criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney who had sought to fabricate dirt against Joe Biden in Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in exchange for Stinger missiles, which precipitated Trump’s first impeachment. On 19 June 2020, Barr announced Berman was resigning. It was news to him. He refused to go. Then, Trump fired him.
After Trump lost the election of 2020, Barr was on board with Trump’s claim it was stolen, sending a memo to DoJ prosecutors to investigate “vote tabulation irregularities”. Sixteen assistant US attorneys resigned in protest. Later, Barr acknowledged, of Trump’s assertion that the election was fixed: “It was all bullshit.” On 14 December 2020, Trump attempted to get Barr’s involvement in the fake electors scheme. Barr declined to be ensnared in an obviously illegal act in a losing cause. He saved himself from becoming incriminated and resigned.
Trump had already got whatever he wanted from Barr up to the last minute, when Barr’s instinct for personal self-preservation asserted itself. On the eve of 6 January, Barr relinquished the Tom Hagen role for his godfather. Trump was done with the disloyal consigliere. He turned to other helpers.
After the January 6 insurrection, Barr accused Trump of a “betrayal of his office”. “All of a sudden, Bill Barr changed. You hadn’t noticed,” Trump remarked. Yet this past April, Barr endorsed Trump for re-election, explaining that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left.” Trump sneered: “Wow! Former AG Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him ‘Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy’. Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill.”
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The conservative majority on the US supreme court, three of whose members Trump appointed, rescued him from facing trial for January 6 before the 2024 election. Taking up Trump’s appeal, the court languidly spent months to render an opinion bestowing on him and future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts”. In its ruling, with a sharp understanding of Trump’s methods, the court stated that a president could order a sham investigation of his political enemies, if he wished, without any restraint or accountability.
The decision was explicit in granting free license to political prosecutions: “The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”
The court has ruled: Trump’s past efforts to stage “sham” show trials of his “enemies” and launch a coup involving the DoJ are above the law. His future dictatorship in which he could exact retribution from his “enemies within”, deploying the DoJ, has received advance approval.
The supreme court’s immunity decision justifying Trump despotism, presented by Chief Justice John Roberts, was better explained in the twisted language of an apparatchik from the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984:
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
On 24 October of this month, Trump boasted about the unlimited power that he would possess once he is back in the White House. Speaking to the rightwing radio talkshow host Hugh Hewitt, he declared that he would at the start fire the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who has indicted him for his crimes of January 6 and stealing national security secrets. “We got immunity at the supreme court,” Trump said. “It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.” Trump would then have 86,398 seconds left to be a dictator on “day one”.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
