Winter came for Donald Trump in the form of a blue wave election in November, 2018. Faced with a blizzard of subpoenas, he had three choices: change his ways; resign; or fight. There was never any real doubt about which option he would pick. True to his upbringing and experience, he would fight, regardless of what it meant to the country and its institutions.
While he was ignorant of policy, he had a strong survival instinct and a kind of low cunning that served him well during the crisis. He saw that he had four great assets: the power and visibility of his office; the support of the right-wing media, which was too invested in him to let him fail; the ability to weaponize law enforcement; and the open disbelief of his opponents that he would be willing to destroy our political system in order to preserve his ego.
With that in mind, he took the following actions:
- He launched a “wag the dog” war on Iran and portrayed the war’s critics as traitors;
- He fired Sessions and Mueller and persuaded the Senate (still held by the GOP) to confirm a bland-sounding AG who, once in office, replaced all of the incumbents with Trump loyalists and criminalized political opposition. Spurious charges were filed on a daily basis against Trump critics, particularly in the media. Many of these prosecutions failed, at least at first. But they ground down the opposition, and the Trump-compliant Supreme Court weighed in on his side. Ultimately, for most, opposition was just too costly, and it stopped.
- Fox News and Sinclair were persuaded, without much trouble, to move from merely triggering and owning the libs to identifying Trump critics, describing them as traitors, and inciting mob violence against them. Groups of right-wing thugs called the CDT (Committee to Defend Trump) sprung up all over the country for the purpose of silencing opposition by force. When the left rose in response, Trump called on elected authorities all over the country to suppress them. They complied. The CDT owned the streets.
- While this was going on, most of the country simply refused to believe it could be happening, and so remained silent.
The 2020 election was a farce. Trump thought about cancelling it altogether, but he ultimately decided to let it go on, because he knew that he couldn’t lose. And he didn’t. The country was now, at best, an illiberal democracy, and the terror only increased.