Trump and his allies know his methods are backfiring: political philosopher

President Donald Trump’s methods of ruling as president have been widely described as “authoritarian,” yet according to a prominent German historian and political philosopher, Americans should recognize that the Republican leader’s approach is in the process of backfiring.

“So much of what is distinctive about Trump’s governance during his second term can serve the consolidation of an autocratic regime and at the same time create particular vulnerabilities for the regime,” wrote Dr. Jan-Werner Müller for The Guardian on Monday. “We have to become better at identifying these weaknesses, as opposed to being shellshocked by Trump’s brazenness every single time.”

Citing Trump’s demolition of the East Wing as symbolic of the president’s approach, Müller said that the administration assumes people will feel overwhelmed by its illegality and will ultimately settle for accepting certain forms of corruption and authoritarianism as accepted reality rather than challenging them.

“This method (strategy might be too big of a word) of illegality – and hope for impunity – now characterizes almost the entire administration,” Müller argued. “More particularly, the Trumpists have figured out that a scandal per year can spell political death, while 10 scandals a day elicit hardly a shrug, because no one, it seems, can keep up. This ‘flooding the zone’ with scandals is in itself a means of generating power – but it also creates vulnerabilities.”

He added, “One never knows whether one scandal – even a relatively harmless one like the reflecting pool disaster, combining grift and incompetence – might not focus the public’s attention after all and become a symbol for the corruption of the regime as a whole, the way that one child abuse scandal – a [former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán ally pardoned a man convicted of covering up abuse – became the symbol of everything wrong with Orbán’s rule.”

Additionally, Müller claimed that Trump’s emphasis on hiring loyalists can be self-defeating because he chooses people who are incompetent, while his cruelty can turn people off even as it intimidates potential opponents.

“And the shameless corruption?” Müller said. “Again, the shamelessness might easily generate a sense of hopelessness on the part of Americans watching unprecedented acts of malfeasance. But, unlike with other aspiring autocrats, the Trumpists are not really creating a coherent system of self-enrichment (the way Orbán did with what came to be called his mafia state – where tricks with public procurement were disguised well enough for many years). Under Trump, everyone just grabs whatever they can as quickly as they can.”

He concluded, “That inability to build a system is ultimately a sign of weakness; the Trumpists themselves do not really seem to believe that their rule will last, and what Mike Johnson, in a revealing moment, called the Republicans’ ‘protection program’ – the majority in Congress – might be gone this year. Self-confident creators of autocratic kleptocracy would have stayed silent on the point – and been smarter in their approach altogether. To be sure, that is no consolation for victims of cruelty.”

Other scholars have also discussed Trump’s authoritarian leanings. Last month, Dr. Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, pointed out that Trump has been consistently thwarted by lower courts, yet abetted by the Supreme Court.

"I think if you want to hold some actor other than Trump responsible for the moment that we’re in, it is the Supreme Court," Moynihan argued. "They are the group that has the standing, they have the role, they have the authority to say, This administration is violating the Constitution, it’s violating the law. And again, they haven’t done that. And in fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve bought into Trump’s legal theories."

Also in July, an expert on the history of fascism explained that Trump is unlikely to create a new American global empire, but could very well destroy its democracy.

“The fact that the U.S. exists and is celebrating 250 years doesn't mean that it'll exist in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years — states have a beginning and they have an end,” University of Toronto historian Timothy Snyder wrote. “I think that the Trump people are much more likely to wreck the U.S. as an entity than they are to succeed in generating some kind of homogeneous tyranny from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”