A lot of Very Serious DC pundits seem to think Trump might just be a Berlusconi — a silly curiosity, but not an existential threat to the nation.
What these folks seem to forget is that when Europe elects a Berlusconi or, perhaps more relevant to current European politics, a crazy Hungarian Prime Minister who wants to bring back to the death penalty, there is an entire menu of supranational European institutions ready and willing to discipline said leader, forcing a return to moderation and politics consistent with global human rights norms.
Brussels has warned Hungary that a fight is looming unless Budapest distances itself from statements about reintroducing the death penalty, which is outlawed in the EU.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, told Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, on Thursday that he had to immediately renounce statements suggesting that the reintroduction of capital punishment was being considered.
And guess what? Hungary took its tough medicine from the liberal (liberal in the classical sense) bureaucrats in Brussels, and the death penalty has not returned to Hungary.
Another example? The Polish people have recently elected a far-right, nationalistic government — Law and Justice Party — willing to tinker with Poland’s constitution and justice system. Predictably, the European Union responded.
The European Parliament resolution, backed by a coalition of liberal and left-wing factions and passed in a meeting in Strasbourg, France, calls on the Polish government to respect the decisions of the country’s Constitutional Tribunal, which is empowered to review Poland’s laws.
The motion urged the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to take actions to force the Polish government to follow the resolution’s recommendations. If the Polish government fails to do so, it could face penalties.
Now, Polish leaders responded with a “we don’t care” to the EU, but that doesn’t change the fact those are just “fighting words”— and, if it came to Poland being pushed out of the EU, Polish leaders would likely comply with European Union directives.
In the United States, however, we don’t have a “North American Union”— staffed with moderate Americans and benevolent, reasonable Canadian and Mexican technocrats — to push a President Trump back from the abyss of banning Muslims, or building a wall, or starting insane trade wars, or torturing the families of ISIS recruits at Guantanamo Bay.
When Poland or Hungary or Italy elects a far-right idiot, they are countries of 60 million (or less!) whose governments mostly answer to the European Union, implementing EU directives, and their militaries mainly engage in peace-keeping activities — not to mention the fact they don’t have thousands of nuclear warheads. If Donald J. Trump wins the general election, however, he will be the leader of 320 million people, control the world’s most powerful military (and its nuclear weapons!), be responsible for appointing the people who guide the direction of the world’s largest economy, and I could go on and on.
If Donald J. Trump wants to shut down portions of the American media— with the tools of an increasingly powerful Executive Branch — he can do that and no Brussels bureaucrat will be able to stop him.
One of those was a radio interview Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone gave this weekend with Breitbart News Saturday. In the interview, Stone denounced CNN and warned, “When Donald Trump is president, he should turn off their FCC license.”The context for this threat is that Trump previously denounced coverage in the WashingtonPost, implicitly threatening to go after the paper’s owner on antitrust and tax issues as retribution for the Post’s coverage. Now Stone is making in a completely undisguised fashion the threat Trump made in a barely disguised fashion.
Donald J. Trump’s Presidency represents an existential threat not only to the United States, but to the entire global order — both security and economics.
Because of this, it is incumbent on the Democratic Party to nominate the candidate most likely to not only beat Trump in November, but to crush Trump.
Unfortunately, that candidate is not Hillary Clinton.
Attention is now rapidly moving to the hypothetical match-up between the leading candidates with an emphasis on a Clinton and Trump contest. In this week's poll, Americans are nearly split between their choice of Trump or Clinton; her margin over Trump narrows from 5 points last week to 3 points this week to 48 percent to 45 percent.
A Trump presidency is dangerous, very dangerous. And mainstream Very Serious journalists who treat Trump as simply another “Berlusconi” are stupid, because Berlusconi was operating within the confines of a European Union straightjacket — President Trump would, quite literally, have the whole world in his hands.
If Democrats have a candidate for which all evidence — polls, mood of the electorate, policy preferences (i.e. the majority of Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans, want single-payer) — points to this person doing better against Trump than Hillary, they may just want to consider this when selecting who will represent The Party.
Trump isn’t a joke candidate or a Tin Pot Prime Minister, like right-wing leaders in the European Union, which serves as a bulwark against extremism in defense of liberalism. He is a dangerous populist demagogue with no respect for the rule of law, at home or abroad. He deserves to be taken seriously — and, yes, that includes the selection of the Democratic nominee.