Newsletter: Trump is a wannabe dictator. Can a conviction save us?

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

You can’t win talking about Donald Trump. Ignoring his outbursts invites charges of silence in the face of authoritarianism. Responding to them brings howls of protest from opponents who say any coverage at all gives him undue attention, and cries of indignation from supporters who believe media elites have it out for their hero. So just about everyone will find something not to like in this newsletter and future ones as he cruises to another GOP presidential nomination.

But will he actually be the nominee? With the possibility of a criminal conviction before the 2024 election, I’m not convinced his nomination is as assured as the polls make it seem. It’s one thing to think of Trump as a convicted felon and insist you’d still support him; it’s another to actually to see the man sentenced after evidence at trial removes all doubt of his guilt and still think it’s prudent to nominate a man in prison. Perhaps I underestimate the hold of the persecution narrative on Trump’s followers, but with multiple trials underway, a lot will happen between now and the Republican convention.

But that’s looking ahead, and we don’t need to do that to find evidence of Trump’s unfitness for the presidency. He provided it when he indulged in racist “birther” fantasies during the Obama administration. He showed it the moment he launched his 2016 candidacy with an anti-immigrant tirade. He proved it again when Americans needlessly died because of his ego-driven response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And he removed any remaining doubt when his followers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

And he’s doing it again now, still a free man nearly three years after the insurrection, promising he’ll be a dictator on “Day One” of his administration if reelected.

To The Times editorial board, Trump is “following, with a remarkable level of devotion, the authoritarian playbook employed by strongmen throughout history, and more recently by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein.” Columnist Robin Abcarian raises alarm that “Trump’s MAGA shock troops have been announcing all over the place that a second Trump term would be dedicated to punishing enemies real and imagined, especially journalists who have dared speculate about how he would set about torching the Constitution.”

Trump, through surrogates and with his own mouth, now conveys his intentions with blinding clarity. A leaked recording making light of sexual assault, the whispers from “adults in the room” that he’s worse than you think, the witching-hour Twitter outbursts — these all seem like the good old days, a more innocent time when we could feign ignorance of Trump’s deep malice because his deputies weren’t promising to jail journalists and he wasn’t saying things like “you want to know why I want to be a dictator?”

So yeah, expect to read more about Trump in this space. After all, he wants to be a dictator, and you don’t have to take my word for it.

Trump’s “Day One” dictator comment is a sad symptom of populist politics. Tell a crowd of supporters that an issue is complicated and defies easy solutions, and you risk losing their attention. Tell that same crowd that the solutions are obvious and so are the bad people stopping you, and you’ll get a lot more ears. “Steamroll these string-pullers and quislings, and everything will be great,” writes Jonah Goldberg. “That’s the language of demagogues and those who help pave the way for them.”

The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete. Zach Gottlieb, a high school senior in Los Angeles, worries about the state of discourse among his peers: “I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.”

“Intifada” has nothing to do with genocide of Jews. In a congressional hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) badgered three college presidents over their students’ use of the word “intifada” — to her, this amounted to a call for genocide. Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab traces the benign historical usage of the word in describing the resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and says equating that struggle with a call for a genocide of Jews is a “bizarre reversal that turns victims into aggressors.”

How can the U.S. renew Mideast peace talks? Recognize Palestinian statehood. Former U.S. State Department official Josh Paul says the Israelis and Palestinians need to be put on equal footing for negotiations to resume: “This change would set the ground for permanent status negotiations between Israel and Palestine, not as a set of concessions between the occupier and the occupied, but between two entities that are equal in the eyes of international law.”

COP28 has become a shameless exercise in the fight against climate change, but can we afford to walk out? Michael E. Mann and Susan Joy Hassol say the recent United Nations climate summit in Dubai, by falling so deeply under the influence of polluters, made a mockery of efforts to pull the world away from fossil fuels. Urgent reform is needed, beginning with one obvious change: “It’s almost embarrassing to have to explicitly state, for example, that petro-states — those whose economies heavily depend on the extraction and export of oil and gas — should not be allowed to host the meeting.”

More from this week in Opinion

From our columnists

• Jackie Calmes: House Republicans can’t govern, but they try, try again to impeach Biden
• Jean Guerrero: No Republican presidential candidate can sound crueler than Trump on immigration
• Harry Litman: Hunter Biden isn’t being accused of any new wrongdoing. So why was he just indicted again?

From the Op-Ed desk

• The trouble with Congress or college presidents policing free speech on campuses
• Same hospital, same injury, same child, same day: Why did one ER visit cost thousands more?
• Why did Israel miss so many warnings of the Hamas attack? Here’s one answer

From the editorial board

• Time to defend California’s hard-won criminal justice reforms from lawmakers. Again
• U.S. should join the world’s nations in demanding a Gaza cease-fire
• Release aid to Ukraine. Helping our allies should not be contingent on U.S. border policies

Letters to the Editor

• With Shohei Ohtani going to the Dodgers, does MLB need to rein in super-rich teams?
• Why Mike Johnson’s public displays of religious piety are a real problem
• Israeli Arabs serve in government and sit on the Supreme Court. How is that apartheid?