When the Radical Right Coalesced to Control the GOP

After President Obama won the 2008 election, wealthy radical libertarian conservatives held a summit in January of 2009 to decide how to respond to the grave threat that Obama posed to their agenda. They bitterly opposed government, taxation, civil liberties and Obama himself. The Koch brothers called the billionaires together. They had been building the radical movement ever since the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that attempted to desegregate public schools.

At the summit, two republican senators, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), were invited to speak about what to do to oppose Obama and trends in government that threatened their wealth and power, especially the rise of civil liberties and environmental regulations. For the radical right, Obama's election was the last straw. It was time to fight all out war against the federal government and civil liberties by any means possible.

In her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, journalist Jane Mayer writes about two visions of how to proceed as argued by Cornyn and DeMint. Cornyn represented the republican establishment and DeMint represented an aggressive far right, non-compromising anti-government ideology that would not tolerate dissent or ideological diversity. Mayer writes:

"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.

Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment fringes of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.

. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."

In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division."

Obama's cluelessness: If one accepts that description of Obama's vision as accurate Obama was full of "wishful thinking" as Mayer put it. He was clueless about what happened to the GOP after his election. The radical right's propaganda and Trump supporters absolutely reject that as Obama's vision and they still hate Obama. To this day they still see him as racist and intentionally divisive while working to enslave the American people under the tyranny of big government.

Koch's raging hypocrisy: Mayer goes on to recount that no one at the summit defended Cornyn's plea for a big tent and cooperation with Obama. Cornyn was met with stony silence, while the billionaires cheered DeMint on. People at the summit assumed that the Kochs opposed the TARP bailout because of their hard core free market ideology. Their political machine, Americans For Prosperity, openly opposed TARP. As it turned out, the Kochs had quietly switched sides and supported the bailout after, as Mayer put it, "the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Koch's vast investment portfolio." In this regard, the Kochs were perfectly willing to use government to defend their own interests, but vehemently opposed to government defending other interests if it presented a threat, real or imagined, to their wealth and power in any way.

Koch's hypocrisy ran even deeper than that. One former insider in the Koch machine saw Koch donor summits before Obama's election as a shrewd way to coax others into engaging in political battles that wound up boosting Koch company profits. The aide asserts that the seminars were an extension of the company's lobbying efforts. The summits were, as Mayer put it, "staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project." What the Kochs did not anticipate for that January 2009 summit, was overwhelming fear and animosity that Obama and his election generated among the billionaires. That summit morphed from a modest pro-Koch movement into a much bigger radical movement that pushed the Kochs into the leadership role. The meeting planners were overwhelmed. According to one the the planners, "Suddenly they were leading the parade. No one anticipated that."

Where we are today: Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.

The radical right propaganda machine has done its work superbly. Most rank and file republicans, populists and Trump supporters (~98%?) firmly believe that getting rid of government will free them and make them better off. They simply cannot see that freeing wealthy special interests from taxes and regulations is not going to free average people because those things do not directly impinge on average people. Most of the freed-up power and wealth (~90%?) will flow from government and the masses to the special interests. Under laissez-faire capitalism as little trickles down as the oligarchs can get away with. A corrupt oligarchy vision of reality is something that rank and file people on the right completely reject out of hand as pure leftist lies and propaganda.

Today, America is in a big mess. Whether the country can get itself back on track is an open question. If the oligarchs gain enough power, they will never let it go without a fight.

Sources of Modern Conservative Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Government

Tax breaks for religion -- Source: Washington Post, 2013

While restlessly rummaging about the interwebs for answers to what the heck is going on in American politics, B&B's vaunted research division blindly stumbled across the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. A reference to that journal asserted it is a key voice for the powerful Federalist Society (FS). That woke B&B up real quick, or wiki wiki as some would say.

The journal is put out by Harvard law school students and is published in three issues per year. It describes itself like this: “The Journal is one of the top five most widely circulated law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. The late Stephen Eberhard and former Senator and Secretary of Energy E. Spencer Abraham founded the journal forty years ago and many journal alumni have risen to prominent legal positions in the government and at the nation’s top law firms.”

One of the articles in the current issue, by Grant M. Newman, presumably a student, The Taxation of Religious Organizations in America, seemed likely to provide some insight about something of interest. The 30 page paper says this:

“Christ taught his disciples to “[r]ender to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The Supreme Court has, to an extent, rendered to God what is God’s by repeatedly acknowledging that it will not involve itself in the internal affairs of religious organizations. Nevertheless, the extent to which religious organizations remain vulnerable to involvement from other branches of government remains a pertinent question, especially with regards to the government’s power to tax.

This Note investigates the extent to which religious organizations are vulnerable to such involvement. A prime example of such involvement is Congress’ ability to use the Internal Revenue Code to the detriment of religious organizations. As it ensures that what is Caesar’s (i.e., taxes) is rendered to Caesar (i.e., the federal government), any policy of Congress and the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) that thwarts the faithful from rendering to God what is God’s has the potential to impose a prohibitive burden on the operation of religious organizations. The potential to hinder the work of religious organizations through taxation is great. Indeed, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Insofar as Congress retains the power to tax religious organizations, it likewise maintains the power to destroy.

In short, religious organizations benefit tremendously from their tax-exempt status. However, this tax-exempt status is not a given; the tax-exempt status for religious organizations is neither a right that was found to be in existence prior to the formation of the United States and therefore enshrined in the Constitution, nor is it a right created by the Constitution. Rather it is a status that is based on the consent of Congress and listed deep in the bowels of the United States Code. Therefore, religious organizations and their allies must remain vigilant in ensuring that their representatives in Congress and officials in the executive branch uphold those portions of the Tax Code that exempt religious organizations from tax obligations.

In order to understand the threat to religious organizations from adverse changes to tax law, it is important to first understand the provisions in the Internal Revenue Code on which religious organizations are granted tax-exempt status, as well as the legislative history behind these sections of the Tax Code.”

As discussed here by Tokyo Jones previously, the issue of giving tax breaks to religious organizations arguably is unconstitutional as a violation of the constitution's Establishment Clause.

Several things stand out as important in Mr. Newman’s paper. First, this paper presumably represents leading edge Federalist Society thinking and it's vision of what that ideology, presumably some form of an anti-democratic authoritarian libertarianism (ADAL), deems important to defend. That makes sense because devout Christians are a necessary core support group for ADAL ideology. President Trump’s move to install two hard core white male Christian judges to the supreme court accords with what the FS and ADAL ideology stand for.

Second, Newman’s paper displays an obvious defensiveness for the tax breaks that religious organizations use to establish and maintain themselves. That is consistent with what I have experienced over the years with the matter of tax breaks for religion comes up. Religious folks demand their tax breaks, often incorrectly seeing it as dictated by the constitution. In 2013, the Washington Post published an article based on data by Ryan T. Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa at that time, indicating that the value of tax breaks for religious organizations was about $82.5 billion/year.[1] I wrote to Cragun and asked about how solid his estimate was. He indicated that it was a soft, conservative estimate because churches tend to be secretive about their finances and, if I recall correctly, his guess was that the tax benefit was probably closer to at least about $120 billion/year. That kind of money is definitely something to be defensive about.

Third, it was surprising to see how honest Newman is about (1) the tenuous basis in law that religious tax breaks rely on, and (2) how those breaks must be defended, calling loss of tax breaks “the threat to religious organizations.” Another rather blunt bit of honesty relates to the government's power to tax according to Mr. Newman: “At the federal level, all income to a person, be it to a corporation or to a non-corporation individual, is taxable by default.” That kind of thinking is not mainstream among rank and file ADAL adherents, including many or most Trump supporters. If Newman’s honesty and clarity of thought is mainstream among FS members, their legal reasoning is significantly out of synch with the irrational chaos of mainstream conservative-populist rhetoric and belief.

Footnote:
1. Newman cites the same Washington Post article. My searches on the value of religious tax breaks turns up very little. Either I've missed information that is out there, or this is an area that needs more research.

B&B orig: 5/3/19

Tyranny Technology Update: Artificial Intelligence for Facial Recognition

Chinese policewoman using facial-recognition sunglasses linked to artificial intelligence data analysis algorithms while patrolling a train station in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China's Henan province

A series of B&B discussions is focused on the technology that China is bringing to bear on how the tyrants there are applying technology in an effort to build a deep surveillance state to control both behavior and minds. China is exporting an array of technology to other countries, who can use it to help tyrants remain in power under cover of reducing crime. A key part of the behavior and mind control effort is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help power facial recognition. Police in China are being equipped with glasses that scan faces. The is sent data to computers with AI-powered facial recognition capacity.

Tech Xplore reports that researchers at the University of Bradford in the UK attained 100% accuracy in facial recognition based on both three-quarter, top half and right half face images. This technical advance permits identification of a person using less than a full frontal face image. Images of the bottom half of the face was correctly recognised 60% of the time, while images of only the and eyes and nose dropped to 40% accuracy. The original article, Deep face recognition using imperfect facial data, was published in the journal Future Generation Computer Systems.

It is reasonable to believe that China is well ahead of the West in this kind of technology development. This is a critical component of China's massive social engineering experiment in building an unassailable tyranny. Obviously, this technology can be used for legitimate law enforcement and security purposes. Nonetheless, it is obvious that this can be used for any purpose where facial recognition is employed, legitimate or not.

B&B orig: 5/6/19

26 USC 6103(f) and Trump's Tax Returns

“The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it. . . . . One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion” How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018

By now it is obvious that President Trump is making a run at establishing a full-blown corrupt, anti-democratic tyranny. His past statements make it clear that he wants to be a dictator for life. His recent statements make it clear that he will resist any further attempts by congress to exert its oversight authority by conducting any further investigations related to him. What was the republican party is now the Trump Tyranny Party (TTP), so there is essentially no possibility they oppose Trump's plan. For practical purposes, the TTP is just as corrupt, anti-democratic and authoritarian as Trump. The last stand of democracy just might come from congressional democrats exerting their congressional oversight authority. The recent assertion that Trump can fire any prosecutor he believes is investigating false allegations against him is tyrant rhetoric. There is nothing democratic about it.

Democratic norms that had been in place since the end of World War 2 are mostly gone now. The stunning weaknesses of democracy in the face of a committed tyrant are obvious. The TPP was fully complicit in their fall. The 2020 elections could turn out to be a sham if Trump gains tyrant power before those elections. The odds of that outcome are low, but now significantly higher than they have been in a very long time. claims that 'we have been through this before and we'll be OK' ring hollow. America has never been through this before. There has never been a time when (1) American society was this divided, (2) one party in power was fully in accord with the tyrant president, (3) America's enemies were relentlessly attacking society and democracy with endless sophisticated, effective propaganda, and (4) the leader of a hostile foreign power, Vladimir Putin, bribing, blackmailing and/or cajoling a virulently anti-democratic US president to do his bidding in foreign and probably also domestic policy. That combination of circumstances has never existed in US history. Absolutely no one can know that 'we'll be OK'. We just might not turn out OK. we might wind up another kleptocratic police state like Russia wants us to be.

It is possible that House of Representatives demands to see Trump's tax returns will trigger a crisis that leads to the fall of American democracy in the coming months or years. He will resist allowing any member of congress from seeing his returns, presumably because they contain evidence that he is a felon and a traitor. Given those stakes and his obvious authoritarian character, it is logical for Trump reject all congressional oversight authority from now until his last day on Earth.

Congress can demand to see tax returns under 26 USC 6103(f): In the early days, all US taxpayer returns were public. That is still the case in some European countries today. Newspapers routinely published the taxes paid by the wealthy. That amounted to transparency that went away over time. The wealthy have always been able to defend themselves from transparency and they will always try very hard to remain shrouded in secrecy.

After those days, only the president had the power to look at anyone's tax returns. That ended after the 1921-1923 Teapot Dome scandal in Warren Harding’s administration. In the wake of Teapot Dome, congress passed legislation in 1924 that expanded the power to review tax returns to congress. That legislation reclaimed the right of congress to review private tax returns. Just as the legislative branch has the power to tax and spend, it also has the power to review personal tax returns as fully within its rights and oversight obligations.

26 USC 6103(f) is long and detailed but the first part of it reads as follows:

(f) Disclosure to Committees of Congress (1) Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Finance, and Joint Committee on Taxation: Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure.

Other provisions include these:

(5) Disclosure by whistleblower: Any person who otherwise has or had access to any return or return information under this section may disclose such return or return information to a committee referred to in paragraph (1) or any individual authorized to receive or inspect information under paragraph (4)(A) if such person believes such return or return information may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse.

(h) Disclosure to certain Federal officers and employees for purposes of tax administration, etc. (h) Disclosure to certain Federal officers and employees for purposes of tax administration, etc. (1)Department of the Treasury Returns and return information shall, without written request, be open to inspection by or disclosure to officers and employees of the Department of the Treasury whose official duties require such inspection or disclosure for tax administration purposes.

(2)Department of Justice In a matter involving tax administration, a return or return information shall be open to inspection by or disclosure to officers and employees of the Department of Justice (including United States attorneys) personally and directly engaged in, and solely for their use in, any proceeding before a Federal grand jury or preparation for any proceeding (or investigation which may result in such a proceeding) before a Federal grand jury or any Federal or State court, but only if— (A) the taxpayer is or may be a party to the proceeding, or the proceeding arose out of, or in connection with, determining the taxpayer’s civil or criminal liability, or the collection of such civil liability in respect of any tax imposed under this title; (B) the treatment of an item reflected on such return is or may be related to the resolution of an issue in the proceeding or investigation; or (C) such return or return information relates or may relate to a transactional relationship between a person who is or may be a party to the proceeding and the taxpayer which affects, or may affect, the resolution of an issue in such proceeding or investigation.

At least some knowledgeable people believe that congress has legitimate power to ask for Trump's tax returns, e.g., former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and some (not all) legal scholars.

Trump's counterattack and the fallout: Trump is clear that he will resist all further inquiries into him and his administration. He will attack the law allowing congress to see his tax returns as unconstitutional, not applicable to a sitting president, not a matter of legitimate congressional inquiry, and/or whatever other defense Trump's team of attorneys will devise. Given the fact that Trump has nominated anti-democratic authoritarian federal judges to the federal bench, with Senate TTP consent, it is likely that the Supreme Court will find that one or more of Trump's attacks on 26 USC 6103(f) to be persuasive. That will allow Trump to keep his crimes and treason shrouded in secrecy. On the propaganda front, Trump will be able to employ the powerful tool the white collar criminal always uses to defend himself, plausible deniability, to its maximum extent.

That will lead to the typical response in current polarized politics. Trump supporters will see total, absolute vindication of Trump. They can go back to chants of Lock Her Up! in their enthusiastic never-ending pursuit of Hillary and her alleged crimes. Trump opponents will see the grave threat to democracy and the rule of law. Another group, maybe 4-10%, will be undecided, confused and/or apathetic. How that social stew will play out is unknowable. Maybe there will be violence and police state repression of the free press and public political protest. More likely, the remaining pro-democracy obstacles fall to the tyrant and the TTP as Levitsky and Ziblatt described in 2108.

Trump: I Can Fire Any Prosecutor I Want

Saturday, May 4, 2019

In congressional testimony a few days ago, Attorney General William Barr commented that President Trump has the power to legally fire any prosecutor he believed was investigating false charges against him. Presumably, his comments were limited to federal prosecutors, but given Trump's ongoing run for tyranny, maybe that applied to all prosecutors in his mind.

Slate writes:

That defense was shocking not simply because it had nothing to do with the legal questions of conspiracy and obstruction before Mueller and Barr, but also because it seemed to have explicitly adopted and accepted the Trumpist worldview that holds any attempt at oversight or investigation deemed by the president to be unjustified harassment is illegitimate. This is, by the way, pretty much the same legal theory being invoked this week to reject the authority of congressional oversight and subpoenas. As Steve Vladek observed this past weekend, the defense that absolutely everything is a witch hunt and thus not legitimate is not a specific constitutional claim. It is, however, a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

Then, in response to questions from Sen. Dianne Feinstein about why it was that Trump ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to end the Mueller probe, Barr seems to have again taken the legal position that the president’s anger and frustration over press reports that he had instructed McGahn to fire Mueller somehow made this directive permissible. Barr seemed to be saying that Trump could not have committed obstruction by asking McGahn to fire Mueller, so long as he was attempting to forestall further negative press. As Barr put it: “If the president is being falsely accused, which the evidence now suggests that the accusations against him were false [which is a lie], and he knew they were false, and he felt that this investigation was unfair, propelled by his political opponents and was hampering his ability to govern, that is not a corrupt motive for replacing an independent counsel.”

That Trump is truly making a run at being a tyrant cannot be much clearer. Of course, if Trump declares martial law, shuts the “enemy of the people” press down, arrests democrats in congress, and orders the US military to machine gun protestors down in the streets, then it would be about a clear as it can get.

The question is obvious: How much clearer does this need to be for Trump supporters and the republican party (the Trump Tyrant Party, not the GOP) to see what is happening before their eyes, or do they actually want tyranny? It is hard to imagine that by now hardly any Trump opponents do not see the grave danger that American democracy and the rule of law are both in. Or, does that overstate the situation?

Book Review: On Tyranny

'People Would Revolt' if Trump is Impeached is Not His Opinion, it's an Instruction to commit violence

Historian Timothy Snyder's 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, is a warning aimed directly at President Trump and his now obvious political goal of establishing anti-democratic, right wing tyranny in America. There's nothing subtle about this short, easy to read book (126 pages). It gets right to the point by comparing the tactics, rhetoric and mindset of 20th century tyrants like Hitler and Stalin to what Trump is doing today in America. Each of the twenty lessons constitute a short chapter. It can be read in a several hours. What Snyder is arguing here is generally in accord with how some others, e.g., Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, have described the 20th century's political monsters.

Unilateral surrender: Snyder's first lesson, do not obey in advance, makes the point that in the face of the tyrant or tyrant wannabe, many people simply let their own freedom go. Power flows from the people to the tyrant. Snyder writes: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. . . . . A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." Examples include a willing transfer of power by the people to Hitler in Germany in 1932 and to the communist tyrants in Czechoslovakia in 1946.

Institutional defense: Snyder argues that democratic institutions do not defend themselves, people defend them: "We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government." Snyder asserts that many Americans are making this same mistake again today. He suggests people pick an institution such as a pro-democracy law, a court, a newspaper or a labor union and defend it publicly.

It is worth noting that a court or labor union would need to be defended. Courts strike many as a rock solid and unassailable institution. However, Trump and senate republicans are packing the federal courts with radical authoritarian ideologue judges. The time is coming when more temperate courts and court decisions will be attacked and the tyrant will foment both public and executive branch resistance to those courts, judges and decisions. We are seeing the beginnings of that right now.

Also consider the proposition that, unless they are co-opted and/or corrupted, labor unions are pro-democratic institutions. Powerful, persuasive arguments by other careful observers make this case. Both Nancy MacLean in her 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America, and Jane Mayer in her 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, make it clear that a key target of anti-democratic authoritarians is labor unions. Powerful billionaires exemplified by the radical right political movement built and still funded by the Koch brothers have a raging, visceral hate of labor unions. Labor unions allow collective action, which is pro-democratic in that they represent some collective power and wealth. That literally enrages the radical libertarian, authoritarian right. Before reading Snyder on this point, the idea of labor unions being a democratic institution seemed out of synch with reality for me at least. But on reflection, Snyder makes an excellent point. He's right.

Resist toleration of violence: Some of Snyder's lessons seem far-fetched. But on consideration, maybe they are not far fetched at all. His lesson six, be wary of paramilitaries, brings this point home: "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. . . . . For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics." Snyder points out that non-authoritarian governments try to hold a monopoly on violence mediated by official police, secret services and sometimes the military, but always constrained by the rule of law. Snyder defines a paramilitary broadly, and it can include an authoritarian leader's personal bodyguard. People in Germany and Austria made the grave mistake of tolerating paramilitary intimidation and violence, and many of the survivors among them came to regret it.

Snyder points to Trump as an example: "As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. . . . . . At one campaign rally [Trump] said, 'There's a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out." When the pro-Trump mob tried to do that, Trump was pleased, saying: "Isn't this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it's fun." Other recent events have made it clear that Trump is actively fomenting violence by his supporters against political opposition.

So, after announcing his candidacy for president in 2020, Joe Biden's opening attack on Trump led with "Charlottesville", referring to the fascist, white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, South Carolina, he was directly attacking a core tyrant tactic. Trump had defended the fascists by calling them 'good people'. Biden threw that directly back in Trump's face as he should have.

Snyder's book is useful to help put tyranny and Trump in better historical and current context. It makes Trump look even more threatening than viewing him without the context.