Like Attila the Hun, Trump is poised to ransack a morally decadent U.S. empire

In an emotionally jarring and disorienting week where you might wake up to a televised, tear-gas haze of cops firing rubber bullets into a crowd of college students in the blackness of a Southern California night, the scariest thing came wrapped in the cover of a magazine.

Donald Trump, locked in as GOP presidential nominee even as he spends his days in a Manhattan courtroom in the first of his four felony trials, spoke at length to a reporter for Time magazine for a piece headlined, “How Far Trump Would Go” — aimed at addressing the growing talk that a second presidential term would look more like a dictatorship.

Trump’s way of addressing the dictatorship controversy was essentially to confirm it.

A 47th presidency under Trump, he told Time’s Eric Cortellessa, would start with dead-of-night raids to round up as many as 12 million undocumented immigrants currently scattered across the United States, some of whom might be placed for a time in mass detention camps. He only encouraged red states empowered by the Trump-flavored U.S. Supreme Court to step up their abortion bans and punishment for women who seek them. Trump’s Washington would be solely populated by loyalist zealots in the remaining government jobs that haven’t been eliminated. Justice in the wannabe president’s vision for 2025 and beyond would mean prosecution for his political enemies and freedom for the thugs who attacked police officers and tried to stop the certification of election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

Of course, Trump tried to have it both ways by claiming his remark to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on Day One” of his presidency was only a joke — just like in 2016 when he asked “Russia ... if you’re listening” to find Hillary Clinton’s emails (which wasn’t really a joke). But the ex-president also explained that he could get away with such comments about an American dictatorship because “I think a lot of people like it.”

Indeed. The never-ending barrage of polls continues to show Trump in a virtual dead heat with President Joe Biden, perhaps leading slightly in the key swing states, despite the almost daily embarrassment of his Manhattan trial pegged to paying hush money to an adult film star, as well as growing awareness of his open desire for autocracy. Trump’s shocking oratory of retribution, coupled with his recent promise in Wisconsin not to accept the 2024 election result there if he loses, prompted Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein to declare: “This is how fascists campaign.”

And yet, two of the most tumultuous weeks in American society in over a half-century have only brought the nightmare of a second, more authoritarian Trump presidency closer to becoming a reality. The violent crackdown on campus protests against Israel’s U.S.-backed campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 34,000, many of them women or children, has dominated TV screens with scenes of domestic strife not seen since the 1960s and early 1970s. In the most shocking clash, at the University of California, Los Angeles, a generation raised on active-shooter drills looked up to see its own government firing rubber bullets at its pro-Palestinian encampment.

» READ MORE: Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them ‘safe’ should scare America about what’s next | Will Bunch

The police state repression of college protests, with more than 2,000 arrests, sharply divided Americans, yet also brought us together in one sense: No one is happy. Many Americans — myself included — are shocked and dismayed by images such as New Hampshire state troopers in riot gear storming a small, peaceful protest at Dartmouth College, tossing a 65-year-old Jewish studies professor to the ground and arresting her.

But that sense of alarm over the threats to free speech has little support from either Republican or Democratic leaders appealing to a not-particularly-silent majority — some who say the police response was needed because of antisemitism, real or perceived, in the encampments, and some who simply prefer law and order and disdain protests. This was the group that Biden appealed to Thursday when he told the nation that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”

Seen through the lens of politics, Biden’s statement felt like an effort to avoid another 1968, when that year’s Republican, Richard Nixon, ran ads showing campus chaos and promising “law and order,” and narrowly won. The 1968 analogies seem apt, especially as Biden’s Democrats prepare again to gather for a Chicago convention, and large-scale protests loom. But I’m thinking an even better comparison is the year 451, when another morally decadent empire stood on the brink of collapse.

Much like the end of ancient Rome’s long run as the world’s lone superpower, the fight to save American democracy is foundering not because of outside agitators, but from the decay of corrupt institutions, not just on Capitol Hill. Universities, the news media, and police departments that are supposed to protect a civil society are failing miserably. An utterly broken nation that’s currently firing tear gas and pepper spray to shut up its own children is easy prey for the various Vandals and Visigoths poised on the outskirts to sack the American empire, much like Attila in 451, and perhaps to eventually topple it. Trump is merely the barbarian at the gate.

In 2024, the chickens that were hatched in response to the late 1960s upheaval — privatized universities that would be run more like corporations than academies of free thought, militarized police forces to rapidly crush protests, and a media cowed by the right-wing assaults that began with Spiro Agnew — have finally come home to roost before our disbelieving eyes.

The crackdown has revealed that the cherished collegiate notion of faculty governance is as quaint as freshman beanie hats and stuffing telephone booths. Dozens of college presidents, led by Columbia’s Minouche Shafik, completely shut out their distinguished professors in rapidly calling riot cops to shut down encampments — to get the new McCarthyism of Republican pols off their backs, to satisfy billionaire donors who see protests as a threat to their wealth and unearned prestige, and to hang onto their fabulously lucrative jobs. This has exposed the modern university as the fundamentally right-wing institutions — glorified hedge funds and real estate companies with an academic wing for branding purposes — that many have become.

The helmeted storm troopers these cowardly college presidents are calling onto campus are like a living embodiment of this weekend’s May 4 conflation of Star Wars (“May the fourth be with you”) and the 54th anniversary of the Kent State massacre. The New York Police Department — which sent a D-Day-sized expeditionary force onto campuses at Columbia and the City University of New York, nearly caused another Kent State by firing a gun in a Columbia building, and then celebrated itself on right-wing media and in a propaganda movie that channeled the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl — revealed a public agency that has spiraled into unchecked authoritarianism.

In a healthy society, the news media might have voiced alarm at such a rapid, heavily armed clampdown on campus free speech, especially when some of the worst treatment from police — or, at UCLA, from club-wielding pro-Israel counterprotesters — has been to journalists, and especially student reporters.

But most mainstream coverage has been nearly as authoritarian as the cops, buying without question “copaganda” about “outside agitators” and whipping up alarm at “violent protests” when, just like in 1968, most of the violence is coming from police. Particularly shocking was Wednesday’s anti-student rant by CNN’s Dana Bash, who said demonstrators were “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe” — totally ignoring the fact that the violence her network had been covering all morning was executed by that pro-Israel mob, not the campers.

That kind of twisted coverage made it easy for Biden — who was personally revulsed by student protest when he was a 1960s law student — to issue his Nixon-lite White House appeal for law and order. In doing so, the president was often disingenuous and loose with the facts; for example, he blamed students for canceling commencements even though the only canceled commencement, at the University of Southern California, was to bar a pro-Palestinian valedictorian from speaking, and had nothing to do with student protests.

Biden’s performance on this issue was profoundly disappointing, especially to those of us who fantasize about an American president who might actually condemn slamming an economics professor to the pavement for questioning police brutality or firing rubber bullets at unarmed college students. There is one thing even more disturbing, however. That is the knowledge that a second term for Trump would be much, much worse.

A Trump 47 presidency would be even more supportive of Israel’s extreme right-wing government and its militarism, and would not hesitate to abuse the Insurrection Act to call up tanks and soldiers to crush anyone who dares to protest. Some of the newsrooms doing a lousy job of covering the protests could be shut down this time next year by a POTUS who has openly declared the media as “the enemy of the people.” Trump’s McCarthyite minions on Capitol Hill are already determined to carry out funding cuts to finish the job of killing the American dream of a true higher education for all.

Nobody is going to like the way out of this mess, because it requires the nearly impossible — mixing pragmatism with an almost hopeless idealism. The pragmatism means a painful moral choice of ignoring Biden’s near-fatal blind spot on sending bombs to Israel by clinging to the good — such as his support for reproductive rights — and voting for him in November as the only real option for stopping Trump. In the alternate world of a Trump victory, the necessity for continued protest, for accountability journalism, and for future fair elections will be crushed.

The hopeless idealism is using the four years of constricted breathing space that a Trump defeat would offer to start rebuilding our shattered America from the ground up and begin electing some candidates who believe that the First Amendment is paramount, who see that higher education — when it can be done right — is a public good, and who can build a society that isn’t reined in by repressive warrior cops. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I know the horror that awaits if we do nothing.

The last two weeks have been awful, but also a moment of clarity. People of good conscience should stop deluding themselves that saving American democracy is only a matter of defeating Trump at the ballot box. It turns out that those who pay the greatest lip service to freedom — overpaid college presidents and news anchors, or self-serving members of Congress — are also the first to call in the riot police on those trying to exercise it. Trump is wrong about almost everything, but he was 100% right about this: When it comes to dictatorship, there are a lot of people who like it.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter