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Trump Is Likely Plotting to Succeed Where South Korea’s Yoon Failed
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead—like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary—ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Dec 04, 2024
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.
In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle-class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out—worldwid—to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.
Of all the events in world news over the past weeks—even more than the escalation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine—President-elect Donald Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.
If he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him.
Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.
The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.
Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.
Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead—like Putin and Viktor Orbán did in Russia and Hungary—ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.
Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.
Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights—like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it)—happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have already surrendered their ability to resist him.
This, as I noted but our media seems to be ignoring, is where Yoon failed. Trump—if he’s successful at cowing Republicans in the Senate into rubber-stamping his picks or allowing recess appointments—may not have those constraints, since he will have ended opposition in the Senate, and his MAGA-seized GOP now also controls the House and the Supreme Court.
Nonetheless, if he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him. Will they still exist by next February?
Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: Democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles.
This is not a new strategy, as Timothy Snyder, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, or Ruth Ben-Ghiat will tell you in their excellent Substack newsletters.
One of the big points Fritz Thyssen made in his book I Paid Hitlerwas to note how he and other industrialists and politicians were required to scrape and bow before Adolf Hitler in the early months and years. There was a competition among the industrialists and German politicians alike after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor to see who could be the most publicly obsequious, slavish, and unctuous toward the new German leader.
Today in America we see a similar spectacle as politicians, media figures, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries flock to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s golden ass.
It was that exact behavior that paved the way for Hitler to shut down the German press, subserviate the Reichstag, and essentially shatter all opposition to his regime in less than half a year.
And it wasn’t just the political class who bowed to him; so, too, did most average Germans, who had become exhausted by the conflict exploding across the political spectrum and so tuned out, immersing themselves instead in sports, family, and entertainment.
As a result, every day brought a new outrage, a new norm destroyed, a new red line crossed, but each was small enough—like appointing an accused rapist and drunk or drug user to run the Justice Department or the Pentagon—that it created a buzz in the political media but wasn’t sufficient to bring even a dozen people out into the streets.
Fascism comes in on cat’s feet, step by gradual but inexorable step. It never starts with one great clashing explosion of evil or corruption that causes an entire nation to suddenly wake up and pour into the streets. There are no trumpets, drums, or cymbals. As Hemmingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises using the metaphor of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, and then suddenly.”
It’s usually the story of an insidious gradualism, like what a German professor told Chicago reporter Milton Mayer about in 1954:
But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
Yoon’s declaration of emergency and martial law was explicit: It banned all political activities of the National Assembly, local councils, political parties, and associations; prohibited gatherings, protests, and labor strikes; and placed the media under the authority of the Martial Law Command.
Trump has made similar threats to our media and promised to use the state’s power of guns and jails to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” claiming, like Yoon did, that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
Yoon’s effort to quickly convert South Korea into an autocratic state has so far backfired, in large part because of public opinion, a still-free press, and the courage of opposition and his own PPP politicians alike. The lesson Trump should learn from Yoon’s unsuccessful attempt is the need to avoid authoritarianism and instead embrace coalition-building, transparent governance, and a balanced approach to both domestic and foreign policy challenges.
Instead, it’s a virtual certainty that Trump is thinking Yoon should have acted before April, before the more progressive DPK took back over the parliament, and should have helped friendly oligarchs to seize the media in advance of his proclamation. And that he needs to move fast, before Democrats can regain power in the 2026 midterms that will be only 22 months away.
The resilience of democracy depends on the strength of its institutions, the vigilance of its citizens, and the commitment of its elected leaders of all parties to uphold democratic values. Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: Democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles. As Trump’s return looms, these lessons cannot be ignored.
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SCOTUS Has Enabled Fascism in America; Will the Senate Intervene?
If the majority on the Supreme Court thinks that the leader they have enabled will allow them to regulate his actions, it can only be because of their ignorance of history.
Dec 03, 2024
The Supreme Court in Trump v. United States has enabled Fascism in America.
We can see why if we examine the best book I know about Nazi Germany, Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State. Fraenkel was a German-Jewish attorney in Weimar Germany. He continued to practice after the Nazis came to power, emigrating to the United Kingdom in 1938 and to the United States in 1939. In The Dual State, published shortly after he arrived in the United States, Fraenkel characterizes the nature of the Nazi state, showing how Adolf Hitler ruled using prerogative powers. Fraenkel draws an analogy between Hitler’s rule and the king’s use of prerogative powers prior to the English Revolution in the 17th century.
Fraenkel shows, well before the events, how, after the court’s decision, as Sonia Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “the President is now a king above the law,” a king with the ability to act arbitrarily, without fear of sanction, in violation of the constitutional restraints the English Revolution sought to impose on the King in the 17th century, and the restraints that prior to the court’s decision, the U.S. Constitution was understood to impose on the president.
The clearest indication, so far, that Trump intends to rule using prerogative powers is his desire to infringe on the Senate’s authority to confirm or reject his appointments.
In patrimonialism, agents in the state function as “personal servants” of the leader. They are the vehicle for the expansion of the scope of the leader’s power, which is enhanced to control areas previously understood as outside the executive’s purview, including many that were previously legislative or judicial.
Charles I was king within an institutionalized state. He was able to claim that his misuse of prerogative powers, substituting them for actions that fell within the scope of parliamentary powers, was legitimate. When Hitler was named chancellor, he quickly moved from an illegal expansion of his powers to a coup d’état, governing using arbitrary prerogative powers. Like Charles I, he cloaked his usurpations in legal terms, but, in fact, as Fraenkel put it, characterizing the Nazi “constitutional” state, “There are no legal rules governing the political sphere. It is regulated by arbitrary measures (Massnahmen), in which the dominant officials exercise their discretionary prerogatives. Hence the expression ‘Prerogative State’ (Massnahmenstaat),” a patrimonial state.
In Nazi Germany, “Absolute dictatorial power is exercised by the leader and chancellor either personally or through his subordinate authorities. His sole decision determines how this power shall be wielded.” In his attempt to legalize his absolute power, the support given to Hitler by traditional conservative forces, including those within a fundamentally conservative legal order, was crucial. While there were sporadic attempts to curtail Hitler’s prerogative, they failed, because of institutional deficiencies and because of the timidity of those who were in a position to defend the Weimar political and legal order. Likewise, in the USA, where the constitutional-judicial safeguards are stronger, the conservatives within the legal and political order have followed their leader like lemmings walking off a cliff. Now the Supreme Court has enabled future presidents to claim, without fear of sanction, sovereign, patrimonial power, immunity for all “official” actions undertaken as president.
Crucially, the determination of what falls under the prerogative is made by the leader himself. As Fraenkel puts it, “The decisions of the state are free from normative restrictions. The state becomes absolute in the literal sense of the word.” The Nazi state suggested that “politics” was independent of the law, “and that the definition of the boundary lines between the two rests in the hands of the political authorities themselves.” If the majority on the Supreme Court thinks that the leader they have enabled will allow them to regulate his actions, it can only be because of their ignorance of history.
While the leader’s prerogative powers may derive from an emergency, it is often the fascist movement that creates the emergency it claims the power to resolve. In Nazi Germany, Fraenkel tells us, “Normal life is ruled by legal norms. But since martial law has become permanent in Germany, exceptions to the normal law are continually made... Whether the decision in an individual case is made in accordance with the law or with ‘expediency’ is entirely in the hands of those in whom the sovereign power is vested. Their sovereignty consists in the very fact that they determine the permanent emergency...”
“From this follows the principle that the presumption of jurisdiction rests with the Normative State,” he continues. “The jurisdiction over jurisdiction rests with the Prerogative state. The limits of the Prerogative State are not imposed upon it; there is not a single issue in which the Prerogative State cannot claim jurisdiction.”
As Fraenkel contends, “the legal situation of the 17th century has been reincarnated. The tendency defeated in England in the 17th century gradually attained success in [Nazi] Germany” (my italics). Now, with the aid of the Supreme Court, we in the United States are at peril of repeating this history, of witnessing President-elect Donald Trump, or one of his successors, acting with absolute immunity in what he chooses to define as his constitutional authority, and the Supreme Court will find that they have authorized him to do so.
The clearest indication, so far, that Trump intends to rule using prerogative powers is his desire to infringe on the Senate’s authority to confirm or reject his appointments. He wants the Senate to let him make recess appointments without their consent, and he has chosen a set of candidates who are among the most unqualified and dangerous in American history. The question now is whether the Senate will guard its constitutional authority to both vet and reject Trump’s candidates. If they do not do so, they, along with SCOTUS, will chart a path to fascism.
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Former Chief of Staff: Trump Said He Wanted 'Kind of Generals That Hitler Had'
The former president "never accepted the fact that he wasn't the most powerful man in the world—and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted," said former adviser John Kelly.
Oct 23, 2024
Two new reports out Tuesday detail numerous comments former President Donald Trump, now vying for a second term, made about his admiration of Adolf Hitler when he was in office, with former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly saying the remarks are part of what make it clear that Trump fits the definition of "a fascist."
At The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that he asked Kelly about reports that Trump lamented that U.S. military officials were not more like "German generals" before and during World War II, who he said were "totally loyal" to Hitler.
"He told me that when Trump raised the subject of 'German generals,' Kelly responded by asking, "'Do you mean [Otto von] Bismarck' generals?'" wrote Goldberg. "He went on: 'I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, 'Do you mean the kaiser's generals? Surely you can't mean Hitler's generals?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals.'"
Two sources also told The Atlantic that Trump said in the White House, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had... People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders."
A spokesperson for Trump told The Atlantic that the former president "never said this."
Kelly also spoke at length to The New York Times on Tuesday, saying he was driven to do so by Trump's recent comments about deploying the U.S. military against "the enemy from within"—including political opponents like U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the prosecution of Trump in his first impeachment trial.
The former chief of staff, who also served as homeland security secretary under Trump, said the then-president "commented more than once that, 'You know, Hitler did some good things, too.'"
Previously, Kelly toldCNN reporter Jim Sciutto that Trump said Hitler "did some good things." Kelly said he had asked, "'Well, what?' And he said, 'Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.'
In a video posted to TikTok, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted that "part of how Hitler made the economy 'good' again was by confiscating the property of Jews and giving it over Germans, or gentiles rather."
"That definitely doesn't sound familiar, doesn't sound like anything Trump wants to do," Bouie said sardonically. As part of their plan to solve the housing crisis, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have said they would carry out mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
The Times published audio of its interview with Kelly. Listen:
Trump "never accepted the fact that he wasn't the most powerful man in the world—and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted," Kelly said.
The interview was released the same day that Trump told Latino leaders at a roundtable discussion that he would use "extreme power" to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border and said President Joe Biden should do the same.
At a rally in Wisconsin after Goldberg's article was published, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said Trump's comments about Hitler and his generals made him "sick as hell, and it should make you sick, too."
If Trump wins the presidential election, he said, "folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had."
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