by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday I got to see a quite
remarkable press conference by President Trump (with the unusually bright White
House lights penetrating his comb-over and exposing his bald spot more than
usual) saying that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are hurting the country by
not giving him the money for his border wall, the conference-committee
negotiations over the Homeland Security funding bill are “a waste of time,” and
he’s planning — or at least thinking — about other steps, including the so-called “declaration of emergency”
that would, he says, give him the authority to take money from wherever he
pleases in the federal budget and devote it to building the wall. Though I’ve
downloaded an article from lawfare.com which says that “Presidential
emergencies” are actually pretty routine — when the article was published in
December 2017 we were actually in 28 of them, mostly dealing with natural
disasters — I suspect what Trump has in mind is a full-scale end run around
constitutional government itself, one more step in his desire to become a
virtual dictator. I’m probably thinking along these lines because of the
program I streamed on Thursday night from the PBS Web site, an episode of their
six-part series The Dictator’s Playbook, dealing with six 20th-century dictators from what might be
called the “B-list”: Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Kim Il Sung, Saddam
Hussein, Idi Amin and Manuel Noriega. Mussolini’s example is probably the most
relevant to Trump because he was the only one of the six who came to power via
exploiting a democratic (or quasi-democratic) system and then destroying it:
Franco won a civil war, Kim Il Sung won a resistance movement and Saddam, Amin
and Noriega all took power in coups. The program describes Mussolini’s history
as a violent kid who got expelled from multiple schools for fighting with his
classmates, grew up to be a hothead and then discovered political causes, first
socialism (he was the editor of the Italian Socialist paper Avanti!) and then Right-wing nationalism. Mussolini not
only invented the ideology of fascism, he coined the name — from the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together with an ax
inside, a symbol of the power of ancient Rome and its standing in the world, to
which Mussolini wanted Italy to return.
The makers of the Mussolini episode of The
Dictator’s Playbook seemed all too conscious
of the Mussolini-Trump parallels: both were fanatical nationalists who appealed
to people with a promise to return their countries to a past age of glory (one
of the expert historians on the show actually says that the reason there are
still Mussolini supporters in Italy who stage fascist parades, fly Mussolini’s
flags and root for a restoration of his regime is that they want to “make Italy
great again”!); both idealized the military (though at least Mussolini, unlike
Trump, actually served in combat); both called their political enemies scathing
nicknames; and, most importantly, both fastened on a scapegoat on whom they
could blame all their country’s problems. For Mussolini it was the Communists
in general and Lenin in particular; for Trump it’s been immigrants and Muslims.
Both rhetorically compared their scapegoats to insects and vermin — Trump’s
over-the-top rhetoric against immigrants fits right in with this particular
version of the would-be dictator’s playbook — and both also savaged their
political opponents, though so far (at least) Trump hasn’t gone to the lengths
of having them murdered the way Mussolini did with his principal rival, Giacomo
Matteotti, in 1924 (and Manuel Noriega did with his, Hugo Spadafora, in 1985 — both dictators
circulated gruesome photos of their enemies’ corpses as a public lesson in what
would happen to dissenters). Most of the histories have portrayed Mussolini as
a sort of junior partner in the Axis, but in fact he took power in Italy in
1922 — 11 years before Hitler seized the rulership of Germany — and the Nazis
copied a lot of the tactics of the Italian fascists, including organizing
uniformed paramilitaries (Mussolini’s wore black shirts, Hitler’s brown shirts)
and engaging in physical assaults against political enemies and their events.
They also staged huge public rallies before adoring crowds (an obvious
commonality with Trump!) and stoked national anxieties by scapegoating marginal
groups — both Hitler and Mussolini went after Communists, and Hitler went after
Jews as well. (The Italian fascists were not particularly anti-Semitic until
Mussolini allied with Hitler in the 1930’s on the advice of his son-in-law and
foreign minister, Count Ciano — like Trump, Mussolini gave quite a lot of power
to a son-in-law that wasn’t particularly capable of using it wisely — and as
part of the alliance started to incorporate anti-Semitism and anti-Masonry into
Fascist ideology.)
The Dictator’s Playbook show tells the history of World War II, in particular the disastrous
campaign by Italy to hold their colonies in North Africa (the Germans had to
send an army to bail their nominal allies out, with disastrous results for both countries of the Axis — Field Marshal Montgomery’s
victory over Rommel at El Alamein is considered, along with the Russian defeat
of the Germans at Stalingrad, one of the two key turning points in the European
theatre of World War II), and Mussolini’s fall from power in 1943, the dramatic
rescue of him from a mountaintop prison by Nazi commandos led by pilot Otto
Skorzeny, and Hitler’s installation of him as a puppet ruler of the northern
half of Italy as the Republic of Saló. Mussolini was finally captured by
Italian partisans in 1945 as he and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were trying to
flee into Austria; they gave him a sham trial, killed him and Petacci, and hung
them both in public until a U.S. army unit took control of the town and finally
cut them down. Mussolini had taken power in a sort of hybrid system, like
Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which there
was both a legislature and a monarchy,
and the monarch still had considerable power — it was he who appointed the
prime minister — which meant that after the war Italians largely regarded their
king as complicit in the misdeeds of Mussolini’s regime, and in a 1946
referendum they voted to end the monarchy and make Italy a republic (though the
vote was surprisingly close). Given President Trump’s hints that he’s going to
declare a “state of emergency” if he can’t get the Democrats in Congress to go
along with funding his wall — though he’s also saying the wall is already being
built — Mussolini’s example seems particularly relevant today even though with
Trump we’re likely to be saved from his malevolence by his incompetence.
Mussolini and the other profilees in The Dictator’s Playbook were all very determined individuals who were able
to make long-range plans and stick to them: Trump seems madly impulsive and
quite frankly lacks the concentration to stick with much of anything for very long — as witness the rapidity with which
his administration’s cover stories change. Still, it’s not entirely
inconceivable that Trump may not only declare the “state of emergency” but
expand it to a general attack on the whole concept of democratic government and
seek to do what he’s always wanted: to rule by decree (the real message he was
sending in the early days of his administration, where he seemed to be
governing exclusively by executive orders, presenting them in handsome
leather-bound cases and signing them in huge letters with a Sharpie, which, as
I joked at the time, he seems to have selected to tell America that a Sharpie
was the only writing instrument big enough for his … hands). Trump also revels
in the same kinds of theatricality Mussolini and Hitler did, with the big
rallies, the adoring crowds and his obvious love for the trappings of power —
and it hasn’t escaped me during the discussion of whether Trump will declare a
“state of emergency” so he can build his border wall in spite of Congress, that
Hitler similarly got the Reichstag to vote him emergency powers through the
so-called “Enabling Acts” after the Reichstag fire, so he was able to
circumvent and escape the limits of the Weimar constitution without having to
go through the bothersome necessity of having it formally repealed. I’ve suggested
not only that Trump could be America’s Mussolini, destroying democratic
institutions and norms once and for all, but also that he might be America’s
Boris Yeltsin, making such a mockery of “democracy” that the country rejects it
and turns to an equally unscrupulous but far more capable character, an
American Vladimir Putin, to replace Trump’s incompetent autocracy with a
competent (though still corrupt) one the way Putin’s replaced Yeltsin’s.
