Since the election of Donald Trump, there has been a slow deterioration of American democracy. His campaign ran on a platform of hate and populism. Trump rallied the extreme right wing white conservative Americans who were upset about Obama's term in office. The residue of the last 8 years of Obama has led to the rise of the Tea Party, which is a radical conservative group who opposes moderation. Trump’s attitude is what I believe resonated most with these folks, because he operated outside of the norms of running for president. Whatever scandal he was dealing with, he merely embraced it and moved forward, putting up a smoke screen.
Most conservatives assumed that Trump never meant the things he said, but just had a cutthroat attitude. Sadly, Trump was not lying. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, and freedom of assembly are just a few of the constitutional rights that Trump’s administration has ignored and thereby diminished. The travel ban, rescinding the rights of trans people, dismantling Department of Education LGBTQIA protections, banning news outlets from the White House, and increasing laws criminalizing protest is just a short list of things that have happened in just over a month under the Trump administration. It seems like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights don’t matter anymore, and it is these policy actions that will continue to erode the American Democracy for the next year.
These policies are also getting a lot of international attention, which is causing speculations around the state of the US democracy. Some folks pondered whether the US should be declared a "failed democracy." Already the US has been downgraded on the international scale of democratic nations called the Democracy Index, which now rates the United States as a “flawed democracy.” This puts the United States on the same level as Poland, Mongolia, and Italy. These studies show the state of our democracy, which is continuing to get worse. These processes are not unfamiliar, and have happened in the past.
The 1932 election in Germany is becoming eerily familiar to our current state. During this time, Hitler rose to power with the help of the Nazi party, which dominated the Reichstag (German parliament). The then-president of Germany issued a decree under article 48 of the German constitution, which allowed the President to take emergency measures without prior consent of parliament. Basically, this enabled them to consolidate the government, which resulted in a transition of power to Hitler in 1933. To solidify his rule, Hitler framed an attack against the Reichstag (someone tried to light it on fire) as an attempted Communist revolution. Thus, Hitler could take the necessary steps to establish a one-party dictatorship in Germany.
At this point you may be thinking: why I am going into so much detail about this history? The reason is that the same thing could happen in the United States. We are beginning to see a less extreme version of this same process-- for instance, Steve Bannon’s appointment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, kicking journalists out of the White House press briefing, and using Immigration Customs Enforcement to conduct arbitrary raids for deportations. These things are similar tactics used by the Nazi party during their rise to power in Germany. The only thing that Trump is missing is an attack which prompts emergency measures. This is the scariest part, because the Trump administration is trying so desperately to find a situation to justify extreme action by the executive. Things like the fabricated “Bowling Green Massacre,” and the “Sweden attacks” should be more concerning than funny, because if Trump can stage or use an actual scenario he could invoke draconian executive rules. One executive order that could be invoked is the Assignment of Emergency Preparedness Responsibilities, which enables a president to decree a functional Marshall Law over the whole country. This is not the only mechanism that the president could use, but just one that has been established. In other words, our country is just one step away from becoming an authoritarian dictatorship, which is frightening.
I want to believe that Trump does not have the ability or the power to invoke such a rule, but look what he has done so far. I would argue that Trump is still merely testing the waters before taking even bigger actions that implicate our democracy. I just hope that both liberals and conservatives in Congress can formulate a slim majority, which is the only thing that would protect us from executive rule.
