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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow to Build An Autocracy
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/The article presents a playbook that Trump could use to set up an autocracy. All the pieces are here. He just needs to complete the plan.
"Its 2021, and president donald trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivankas arm during his infrequent public appearances. Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The presidents supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.
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Most Americans intuit that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss. Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really knows.
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The business community learned its lesson early. You work for me, you dont criticize me, the president was reported to have told one major federal contractor, after knocking billions off his companys stock-market valuation with an angry tweet. Wise business leaders take care to credit Trumps personal leadership for any good news, and to avoid saying anything that might displease the president or his family.
The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warners CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trumps definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justices antitrust complaint against Amazon, the companys founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of The Washington Post. The papers new owneran investor group based in Slovakiahas closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage."
This is chilling, because Trump is already doing some of these things. This is what happened in Poland and Hungary, I read. Poland has become increasingly far-right in a few short years. Clamping down on freedoms, tolerance, globalism.
In the past, Trump's contractor had also hired a lot of non-union undocumented Polish workers for a big project (Trump upon seeing them said "They're hard workers" . The workers were not provided with hard hats, and stopped work several times because they hadn't been paid.
It's expected that Poland will give Trump a warm welcome, since both Poland and the U.S. are on the same path to far-right government, in a likewise short period of time.
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How to Build An Autocracy (Original Post)
Honeycombe8
Jul 2017
OP
sharedvalues
(6,916 posts)1. This is the danger. Frum is on point
Frum- former GOP speechwriter, fired by GOP think tank AEI for going off message about Obamacare- wrote this in Feb. Mar issue of the Atlantic.