Why Trump doesn’t mind being called ‘dictator’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

Wall Street may be hitting new highs, but it feels like the Philly sports bubble is bursting. The Union’s season — and maybe its run of sustained excellence — is over. The Eagles are alive, but exposed. And John Middleton’s close-but-no-cigar Phillies are standing pat. Is this the end of an era, or just the darkness before the dawn?

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It seemed childish the first time he did it. Donald Trump was on the presidential debate stage with Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2016 as she warned voters about the GOP candidate’s alarming fondness for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, stating that Trump was his “puppet.”

Trump’s churlish schoolyard response — which struck me as lame when I watched it — was to interrupt and blurt out, “No puppet...you’re the puppet!”

Somehow, Trump was elected the 45th president a month later. Today, the same guy is running to be the 47th president, and — facing a world of trouble, including 91 felony counts, that make the allegations of seven years ago look tame — is doubling down on this political strategy with a third-grade reading level response, which can be best described as, “I know you are, but what am I?”

At a recent rally, the first president in American history to be criminally indicted, including charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that he lost, told an Iowa rally that the real corrupt POTUS is the one currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “Joe Biden is not the defender of democracy,” proclaimed Trump, “Joe Biden is the destroyer of democracy.”

There hasn’t been this much projection since the golden age of drive-in movies.

As 2023 thankfully winds down, a big chunk of the mainstream media is taking Trump’s tyrannical promises both literally and seriously — something many of us have been begging them to do for a while. It’s become impossible for outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, or others to ignore the facts that the frontrunner for the GOP nomination is quoting Adolf Hitler while allies draft a plan to replace much of the federal government with Trump flunkies, prosecute enemies and release insurrectionists, and sic troops on protesters.

And yet it’s almost as if Team Trump was begging for this kind of coverage. That’s because the far right’s major project for decades has been to drain all public confidence in institutions, but especially the media. For the millions who’ve bought into Trump’s battle cry that journalists are “the enemies of the people,” a front page headline calling the candidate a wannabe dictator means he must be on the right track. After all, any enemy of the media must be a friend.

Rather than ignore the Trump autocracy reports, Fox News primetime host Laura Ingraham led her show with news clips of the former president being compared to Nazis, as she called the media the “phony democracy defenders” and accused journalists (in a mocking voice) of making “wild and scary predictions” about a Trump 47 presidency. As a chyron below her proclaimed that media attacks on Trump are “reaching ludicrous levels,” she described the Republican’s anti-Biden remarks as clever. I saw this clip in a Fox News website article by the formerly respected media critic Howard Kurtz headlined: “Atlantic, top newspapers, MSNBC launch campaign against second Trump term.”

This was before another Fox News host, Sean Hannity, pressed Trump during a town hall event and the candidate just came out and confirmed he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One,” in order to “close the border” and “drill, drill, drill.” Afterwards, Republicans like Michael McCaul of Texas insisted, “It’s entertainment.” But was it, or was Trump following the political maxim of his close advisors, to flood the zone with, um, waste matter?

Clever or childish, Trump’s latest effort to turn the table and make Biden the corrupt dictator achieves the goal of making the typical, lightly engaged voter disgusted with the whole system — and more likely to vote for the man who’s promising to blow that system up, whether it’s on Day One or over four years. What’s more, Trump and his team are inoculating themselves by telling the world that he plans to govern as a rule-breaking “Red Caesar,” so no one will be too worked up when it actually happens.

America’s unbroken streak of presidential elections every four years and the lack of (successful) coups helps us cling to the false sense of security that a dictatorship can’t happen here. And so I’m sure some folks at The Atlantic or the New York Times think merely publishing headlines about a Trump dictatorship will wake up all the good and decent people, and his campaign will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. But it can happen here. Millions of Americans want a strongman who’ll break the rules if that means crushing the people they’re convinced are the real authoritarians, including those annoying journalists and maybe a few college presidents for good measure.

It’s bad enough that Trump’s at least partial public embrace of dictatorship has seen him doing better than ever in the latest batch of polls, with a seemingly insurmountable lead in next month’s Iowa GOP caucus and polls showing a lead over Biden in Georgia and Michigan. But the candidate’s strategy to tarnish Biden as “the anti-democracy candidate” is also spurring House Republicans to vote as early as Wednesday for an impeachment probe of the 46th president, despite a total lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

What the Americans who’d actually prefer not to live under a dictator need to understand is that the number of voters who’d abandon Trump over a New York Times article calling out his autocracy is minimal, maybe infinitesimal. But such journalism is still valuable, because it can rally the beaten-down, or uncertain-but-probable Biden voters to show up on Nov. 5, 2024. They certainly can’t say America’s dictator-in-waiting didn’t warn them.

Question: Should [Pa. Gov. Josh] Shapiro really be on anyone’s list, at this point, as a Democratic nominee for the presidency? — Via bs dtectr (@bsdtectr) on X/Twitter

Answer: It’s too late for 2024, despite when anyone says, but it’s hard not to watch the glib and nakedly ambitious first-term Democrat and not think he’s eying a future White House run in 2028 or later. Shapiro has proven a master at finding the pragmatic, middle-of-the-road stance that political pundits love — as long as no one scratches the surface. His politically popular piling on Penn’s Liz Magill when she was down got him on the New York Times homepage, coming close to but not crossing the line of an elected official calling for someone to be fired over speech. He’s seeking compromise to continue fracking even though the world may be on fire by 2028 when, yes, I predict he’ll be a candidate.

Maybe it’s a sign of these perilous times, but very few of you wanted to weigh in on the current controversies over free speech on college campuses — the question I dropped last week before Penn president Liz Magill’s congressional testimony led to her ouster. Bobbie Harvey wrote that the complex situation in the Middle East should spur calls for better education, adding: “Criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and of the settlers in the West Bank is not antisemitic any more than criticism of Hamas or Hezbollah for their terroristic attacks on Israel is not anti-Muslim.”

📮This week’s question: The mainstream media is finally calling out the dictatorial nature of Trump’s plan for a second term, and yet the GOP frontrunner continues to rise in the polls. So what’s the right strategy for sounding alarm about the danger of a Trump 47 presidency and actually beating him at the ballot boxes in November? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. (Please put “Trump strategy” in the subject line, so I can find your responses among the hundreds of junk emails I receive daily.)

The Washington Post led the paper Monday with a bombshell story — and for once I mean that literally. A journalist working for the newspaper inspected shell fragments from an Israeli attack on a small Lebanese village — a skirmish in its simmering conflict with Hezbollah ― and confirmed that the weapons contained white phosphorous, a burning substance banned for use against civilians, and that they were supplied by the United States. The bombing of tiny Dheira with the lethal shells, which burn at unusually high temperatures, injured nine residents in a sustained attack that locals called “the black night.” Amnesty International said the assault should be probed as a war crime.

It was certainly not the worst moment in an almost unspeakable war between Israel and Hamas that has reportedly claimed more than 18,000 lives — most of them civilians in Gaza, including more than 6,000 children. But the story also feels more than a little symbolic of how Israel and the United States are linked in ways that feel increasingly uncomfortable. Since the end of a brief ceasefire and hostage exchange, Israel has actually stepped up the pace of killing, with the deaths of journalists and leading cultural figures like the academic and poet Refaat Alareer raising uncomfortable questions about targeting by the Israeli Defense Forces. And yet the Biden administration chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world when it vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire.

Instead, Team Biden seems to have hardened its commitment to a military solution, even bypassing congressional approval to ship another 14,000 rounds of lethal tank shells to Israel. I am really struggling with my deep disappointment over America’s conduct. Biden has stood as our last imperfect hope for defending democracy against Donald Trump’s promise of dictatorship. But there’s absolutely nothing democratic about complicity in the slaughter of children who won’t grow up to become full-fledged citizens. On Monday, the heads of some of the world’s leading humanitarian organizations pleaded with the United States to use its power to force an end to this fighting. I hope someone in the White House is listening — for the sake of our democracy, Gaza’s children, and the world.

You know me: I can’t even listen to an oldies station on the radio without thinking about politics. Eleven years ago on this date, I was struck by America’s changing attitudes toward poverty and how they were reflected in pop music — and the wistful longing for a more egalitarian U.S. society that jumped off hit singles of the 1960s like “Dawn,” “In the Ghetto,” and “Down in the Boondocks.” I wrote: ”Songs like these would not have been popular in the 1960s but for one thing. People cared. They wanted the boy from the wrong side of the tracks to get the woman of his dreams, and they ached that the girl from the poor side of town could not so easily escape the cruel fate of her birth.” Not so much today, and I explained why in this Dec. 12, 2012 piece: “Down in the boondocks.”

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