The Weekly Sift

Joe Biden’s ace in the hole is Donald Trump himself, who has fallen into the Autocrat Trap.

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Previously I’ve outlined why I’m optimistic that President Biden will prevail in the fall, saving the US from a Hungary-style autocracy:

• Biden is on the right side of many issues the public cares about, like abortion, gay rights, gun violence, Ukraine, climate change, and democracy itself.
• The economy has been improving long enough that the public has started to notice.
• The Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments validate his view that government can do good things for the American people, like rebuild our roads and bridges, lower the cost of prescription drugs, or bring broadband internet to rural communities. (Trump’s primary legislative accomplishment was to give the wealthy a big tax cut.)
• The electorate continues to change in Biden’s favor, as older MAGA voters die off and are replaced by younger, more liberal voters. [1]

But there is one more reason I’m optimistic — not a positive thing about Biden but a negative thing about Trump: He has fallen into the Autocrat Trap.

Trump has declined since 2016. Before I explain what that trap is, let me point out that I’m not the only one to notice that Trump is off his game. In a recent TPM newsletter, Josh Marshall started with a blunder Trump made in an interview (“there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting”, which sounds an awful lot like a threat to Social Security and Medicare), and expanded to a more general point, that Trump is “rusty” and has “lost his touch”.

Marshall paints a picture of how Trump’s rhetoric has changed since 2016.

Trump’s 2016 campaign’s success stemmed in large part from channeling the cultural and social grievance of middle aged white American men. His 2024 agenda is heavily focused on his personal grievances and doing away with all the restraints on the presidency that hobbled him and led to ego injuries in during his first term

2016 Trump communicated that your resentments were his resentments, but 2024 Trump has turned that identification around: He wants his resentments to be your resentments. 2016 Trump got upset that “the elites” weren’t giving ordinary people a fair shake. But 2024 Trump wants ordinary people to get upset that “the Deep State” isn’t giving him a fair shake.

2016 Trump literally crowd-sourced his message. “Build a wall” and “Lock her up” started as throw-away lines, but when his crowds responded to them they became the center of his campaign. But 2024 Trump’s relationship to the crowd has changed.

Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.

Marshall doesn’t assign a definite cause to this “rustiness”, but suspects age might be a factor, together with the sting of his 2020 defeat (which he knows was a defeat, no matter what he says), and panic about the legal peril he faces.

Whatever the precise mix, it also impacts his political agility and feel for the popular mood. It leads to stuff like this wholly unforced entitlements goof. This probably won’t be the only example. It hasn’t gotten much attention yet because even though Trump gets coverage, he hasn’t been in the mix of an actual campaign in years. We’ll see more of it because, again, he ain’t the same.

Actually, it’s already not the only example: Trump gave away his best issue by telling Speaker Johnson to torpedo the border bill that Congress was ready to pass. Now Biden has an answer to criticism on that issue: I tried to solve it, but Trump had his allies stop me. The inaction on the border is now arguably Trump’s fault, not Biden’s. [2]

And while I agree that Trump is showing some decline from aging, I don’t think that’s the main source of his recent (and future) mistakes. I think he’s fallen into what we might call the Autocrat Trap: His successful purge of his inner circle, together with his complete intimidation of the Republican Party, means that he is surrounded by sycophants. Absolutely no one is in a position to tell him “You can’t do that. That’s a bad idea.”

Even a great leader needs such people. George Washington had them. Lincoln had them. FDR had them. Trump doesn’t.

How the Autocrat Trap works. I’m going to make a Hitler comparison here, but not so that I can smear Trump by using his name in the same paragraph as one of history’s most hated people. If you want to object that Trump hasn’t started a world war or set up death camps, that’s fine; it doesn’t affect the point I’m making.

I’m mentioning Hitler because he is a well known and extreme example of an autocrat. If there were some dysfunction typical of autocrats, we’d expect to see it in Hitler. And we do.

By 1936, Hitler had eliminated public political dissent, but he still had to face behind-closed-doors resistance from his general staff (the 1930s German equivalent of “the Deep State”). In a nutshell, Hitler was a risk-taker and the generals were more cautious. The military men recognized Germany’s rearmament was incomplete, and understood that the Fatherland would lose any rematch with France and/or Britain. But Hitler grasped just how traumatized the British and French people still were by the Great War of 1914-1918, and bet that their elected leaders would avoid restarting that war, even if they would surely win it again.

So over the generals’ protests, Hitler ordered one audacious move after another: advancing into the Rhineland demilitarized zone bordering France (1936), Austria (spring of 1938), the western section of Czechoslovakia (fall of 1938), and the rest of Czechoslovakia (spring of 1939). As Hitler had foreseen, the Western Powers did nothing. The invasion of Poland (fall of 1939) brought declarations of war, but no counterattacks. Denmark and Norway (April, 1940) fell with little opposition.

By then, rearmament was complete and Germany was ready to reverse the outcome of the Great War: France, Belgium, and the Netherlands fell in May of 1940, and the air war against Britain began.

Picture Hitler at that point. He was a gambler with hot dice. He had proved again and again that when cautious people tried to hold him back, they were wrong and he was right. So why should he listen to them at all? Events had shown that he was a genius. He had a destiny.

That’s when the big mistakes started. He attacked Russia before he had finished off Britain. He let the Greek campaign delay the Russian campaign. And then, rather than postpone until the next spring, he launched his attack in late June of 1941. Due to the late start, and despite initial military successes, German forces were still short of Moscow when the fall rains turned Russia’s roads to mud. In winter, the Russians counterattacked. Hitler’s generals advised pulling back to a more defensible position and restarting the advance in spring. But why would he listen to them? They had always advised more caution, and they had always been wrong. So: no retreat, not a single inch.

German losses that winter were horrific, turning the Russia campaign into a war of attrition that put Germany at a disadvantage. And though the German advance was able to restart when the weather changed, those first-winter casualties contributed to the decisive defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. The Allies launched D-Day from the still unconquered British Isles in 1944, and the war was soon lost.

Trump 2024 vs. Trump 2016. When Trump ran in 2016, the Republican establishment was against him. As he won one primary after another, they slowly got on board. But many got off again after the Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before the election. Some even called for him to withdraw. (Luckily for Trump, he managed to keep Stormy Daniels’ story from getting out and making things worse, and his allies at WikiLeaks were able to muddy the news cycle by releasing a batch of Democratic emails hacked by his allies in Russia.)

Thanks to the Electoral College, he won anyway, proving that he was right and the naysayers were wrong. But even as he took office, many power players in Washington had no particular loyalty to him, like Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

A new president has to appoint thousands of executive branch officials. But who? TrumpWorld had never been that big, and McConnell’s Senate was unlikely to confirm Trump yes-men with no relevant experience. So initially, the Trump administration was staffed with veterans of the Bush administration or Congress, CEOs, and military men who saw themselves as Republican or conservative, but not necessarily MAGA. Again and again, such appointees got in Trump’s way: Attorney General Jeff Sessions (the first senator to endorse Trump’s candidacy) appointed Special Counsel Bob Mueller and refused to interfere in his investigation. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis repeatedly stopped him from withdrawing from Afghanistan. White House Counsel Don McGahn refused Trump’s order to fire Mueller and regularly warned him that things he wanted to do were illegal.

By 2020, many of the Trump officials more loyal to the law or the nation than to Trump had either been fired or left in frustration. But apparently not enough of them, so Trump appointed John McEntee to conduct a purge of his insufficiently loyal subordinates, many of whom were replaced with “acting” officials the Senate never confirmed.

Even so, after Trump lost the 2020 election, his effort to stay in office anyway was repeatedly hindered by members of his own administration. Vice President Mike Pence refused to cooperate in the January 6 plot. Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley made it clear the military would not intervene in his favor. Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen wouldn’t sign Jeff Clark’s bogus letter telling the Georgia legislature that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election”, and also led a department-wide threat to resign if Trump named Clark to replace him. The previous attorney general, Bill Barr, publicly denied that the Department had found any evidence of the election fraud Trump was claiming.

All those people are gone now. They have been branded as turncoats and banished from any future Trump administration. Even Ivanka and Jared have withdrawn. [3]

In the meantime, the MAGA cult has expanded. Much of the attention this has gotten has focused on a potential second Trump administration: The Heritage Foundation has launched Project 2025 to collect resumes of loyalists hoping to staff the next administration.

Unlike previous presidential transition teams, this one is focused on personal loyalty, not experience or other qualifications. (A question from the application: “The president should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials. Agree/Disagree/Neither.”) So when Trump-47 decides to overthrow democracy, the only question he’ll face is “How do you want us to proceed, sir?”

But something similar has happened elsewhere, and the consequences have gotten less attention. Trump’s lawyers have become little more than mouthpieces for what he wants the public to believe about his trials, whether that strategy helps or hurts him inside the courtroom. (Judging from the size of the civil judgments against him, it hurts.) On the political side. Trump has made his daughter-in-law head of the RNC and started a purge of the staff.

So across the board, anybody who might have the independent stature to say, “I know you’re the boss, but this is dumb” is long gone. Even after a mistake is in motion, nobody is going to point it out to him.

So far, his blunders haven’t hurt him much, largely because he hasn’t been getting that much attention. He stayed away from mass-viewer events (like debates) during the primary campaign, and the mainstream media has all but stopped covering his rallies. Most voters have barely seen the 2024 version of Trump, and have barely paid attention to his pronouncements on major issues.

That has started to change, and will change more and more as the election approaches. This summer’s Republican Convention, I predict, will be a major disaster for Trump, because he will have complete control of it. And day after day, all the way to the election, a sycophant-supported Donald Trump on the campaign trail will be Joe Biden’s greatest asset.

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[1] The replacement-by-illegal-immigrants story Trumpists tell is nonsense, but the fact that they are being replaced — by their children and grandchildren — is true. Trumpists helped this trend along by refusing to be vaccinated during the pandemic.

[2] Whether or not Trump’s prediction of a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected is such a mistake was a point of contention this week. I’ll cover that in detail in the next post, the weekly summary.

[3] In the 2017-2021 administration, Ivanka and Jared were believed to have the ability get Trump to see reason. That’s why Susan Collins called Ivanka during the January 6 riot.