Frank's Musings

What if President Donald J. Trump is only the unwitting showmanship tool of a diabolical would-be autocracy?  (See Thomas Edsall’s essay in the 9/2/2025 NYT.)   Edsall names the Svengalis behind Trump’s  would-be throne: Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.   Vought and Miller, according  Edsall, “are coldblooded, ideologically driven strategists who have spent nearly a decade developing the foundations for this MAGA takeover of what was once a familiar American way of life.” 

Throughout his career Trump has been the benighted heir to a giant real estate fortune who has repeatedly fooled bankers, other investors, and electoral majorities into backing his personal ventures in other fields. But his ability repeatedly to garner such  support has been too tempting for right-wing political  schemers to ignore.   Their goal is to distort the Constitutional trappings of America’s liberal democracy into a formula for legitimizing autocratic rule and depriving average citizens of their equitable rights.

This danger has increasingly been recognized by alarmed members of  both Parties.  However, they are all such true believers in the mythological foresight of the creators of the Union that they are easily manipulated by determined masterminds armed with a popular, narcissistic, and pliant demagogue.

Solving this predicament requires youthful leadership, experienced in defining and defending liberal democratic values, as well as appealing to stay-at-home audiences.  A television or radio  personality might fit the bill; after all Ronald Reagan, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and others have succeeded in making that shift in roles.  Of course, that kind of presidential candidate would have to be backed up with a circle of government policy professionals.  Nevertheless, owing to the country’s recent record of incompetent cabinet secretaries, it is not unreasonable to expect that such a presidential ticket would be welcomed by an electoral majority.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

In Trump’s criticism of the “woke”  interpretation of U.S. history at the Smithsonian Institution, he calls for modifying its presentation of some of the shortcomings of our government and cultural practices to “correct” mischaracterizations of our culture.  Reactionary policy is a  form of paternalism and it can lead to tyrannical rule.   But what the MAGA crowd resents, and what Trump has successfully appealed to, is its resentment of being told what to do by the country’s educated elite—by their paternalism.  Thus, paternalism can vitiate democracy from two directions. 

Trump’s  supporters in the 2016, 2020,  and 2024 elections  were convinced that he represented their resentment of the disregard of their immediate interests by the dominant groups in the U.S. government.  The bureaucracy under  previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, consisted of an elite stratus of society who were typically college educated and socially segregated from the backgrounds and immediate concerns of the majority of the public.  Because the U.S. republic is built on the assumption that majority rule guarantees the most equitable outcome of government policy, most of them believed that, somehow, they had been victims of corrupted democratic ideals and voted to restore their idealized concept of self-rule.

However, particularly during Trump’s second administration, they are learning that attempts to restore this simplified version of democratic principles can easily lead to autocracy and the loss of popular control of government policy.  The restored Trump presidency has witnessed even more egregious faults that include the following:

These failures of the restored Trump presidency are largely owing to the weakening of the power of the checks and balances built into the Constitutional structure of the republic created 250 years ago.  It did not anticipate how thoroughly our society would be released from the bounds that the sense of individual responsibility imposes by the substitution of third-party information for personal thought.  Not only has the public been trained to rely on showmanship for the validation of factual truth; the public’s representatives in its democratic government have also subsumed their commitment to principled behavior to personal life goals—their professional  careers. 

A demagogue like Donald Trump can take advantage of how American society has been transformed by its subservience to skilled use of  communications technology.   The legacy structure of the U.S. government does not allow change in its rules of “checks and balances” to occur swiftly.  Therefore, it will take a long time to correct the features of the Constitution that allow it to be used to facilitate authoritarian distortion.  Determination and patience will be necessary to protect the ideals of our Founding Fathers from the paternalistic tyranny of 21st Century autocrats.

The judgment of the majority of people in entertainment-soaked societies has been corrupted by their reliance on the messages that are most effectively communicated. Instead of thinking for themselves and listening to influencers who present their arguments in anticipation of thoughtful audiences, they have been conditioned to accept the messages of those who best use modern communications techniques.

President Trump acts as if Vladimir Putin has agreed to collaborate with him as a partner in a Good Cop Bad Cop routine for handling a presumptuously nationalistic Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But it isn’t just a routine for Putin. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, pointed out that without a cease-fire, the whole melodrama only disguises the Russian leader’s relentless megalomania.

Trump believes his voters, like him, are more motivated by self-image than by economic gain. If he really did his best to help them achieve that goal, his administration would tax companies that invest overseas to hire foreign workers to lower their production costs instead of taxing consumers for buying imported goods. The objective of this policy would be artificially to equalize labor costs from market to market and to raise the U.S. employment rate.

Of course, this benefit would cause inflation in the American economy and result in higher-cost living worldwide. That is not much of a concern for high income consumers in comparison to the hoi polloi. Investors in search of increased ROI won’t favor such a strategy. But that is not important to a prestige-hungry narcissist, like Donald Trump. His politics are contemptuous of both ends of the wealth spectrum.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency under the direction of Mr.Tom Homan has been operating in violation of the international refugee agreements which the U.S. has signed and ratified, namely the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.  These UNHCR documents require  applications by international refugees to a signatory country’s  courts for asylum to be considered with due process of law, including the appeal of any rejection by those courts.  It has been reported that ICE agents have abducted and deported immigrants from certain foreign countries of origin virtually at the moment of rejection by immigration judges of their initial applications for asylum without even allowing their representation and counsel by qualified attorneys.

David Brooks’ essay in the 7/17/2025 NYT wrongly advocated the approaches of FDR and Reagan for  reviving the U.S. economy.  The comparative  advantage of the US economy is withering away despite the multitude and expansion of government institutions (credit  DOGE at least for targeting the right problem). The private sector is America’s strength; and the government can best stimulate its growth by providing speculative finance to encourage innovation.

Filtering tax revenue to  startup ventures will sometimes fail; but ultimately it will result in world-leading economic and technological development. The government’s primary function is to ensure that the resulting wealth is shared equitably among all taxpayers.  Washington should act merely as their agent and subsequently guarantee their fair reward.

Sincerely,

Frank A. Ocwieja