A former president, convicted felon, and liable-for-sexual-abuse 78-year-old man who paints his skin orange said he would be a dictator “on day one,” promises to turn the American justice system into his secret police, encourages bribery, openly supports and courts oppressive and murderous despots around the world, and would enter the Oval Office with Project 2025 ready to roll, a plan to replace expertise and competence with obedience to whatever whim the dear leader spews from one second to the next.
Powerful Republicans cannot stop Donald Trump; they parrot his lies (falsehoods, mistruths, and misstatements in mainstream media speak) and do whatever he says or lose their livelihoods. It’s much easier to craft justifications and excuses than risk not being able to feed your family. Plenty of voters seem to enjoy Trump’s violent rhetoric, promises of revenge, and rants about sharks, windmills, and electric vehicles.
Part of me thinks many Americans, still quite comfortable, see this is an amusing game. It’s just another election, the reasoning goes, but another oddly entertaining one like the last time. What a hoot, they think from the comfort of couches, scrolling feeds on their phones: An unpredictable, orange-skinned entertainer upends every norm, continually sending the entire public conversation into spasms. Gosh, isn’t that billionaire New Yorker pretending to be a man of the people fun? He’s really getting all those nasty liberals I hate mad! How engaging it must be to see staid, predictably boring, and sanctimonious politicians get run over by a man who will say anything and keeps redefining the term “nadir.“
Approximately 5 trillion news stories later about the shocking presence of this charlatan on the national stage, and nothing has changed. A criminal is running for the office of the presidency. A debate proceeds as if he is just another candidate.
For people to imagine what it means to support someone who is committed to destroying freedom for everyone and our system of governance, I thought it would be helpful to try to grasp what it’s like to live in places without the rule of law, which is the type of place America will become if Trump wins and enacts his current plans and hatches new ones, as the mood strikes him. The sources below are of varying quality and confirmation, but I am looking for quick snippets of what life becomes when rules are whatever some clown in a suit says they are.
My hope is this spurs more journalists to start painting a picture of living in societies that are drastically different than America, or what America says it is trying to be, so people can start to understand that the ideas and values we have — had? — are unique, fragile, and worth keeping, even if the expression of them is often flawed, painful, and unjust. In other words, things can and will get much worse with a despot at the helm.
- Public services decline: “Dictatorial governments are found to provide public schooling, roads, safe water, public sanitation, and pollution control at levels far below democracies.” / Source
- Economy suffers: “Democratic institutions lead survival-oriented leaders to care more for the private market, and thus to follow policies that enhance the productivity of the whole economy.” / Source
- Truth destroyed: “Most dictators maintained power by repressing any opposition, controlling all communications, punishing critics, (often) imposing an ideology, attacking the ideal of pluralist democracy, and blocking most cross-border flows of people and information. …. But today’s strongmen realize that in current conditions violence is not always necessary or even helpful. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval. In place of harsh repression, the new dictators manipulate information. Like spin doctors in a democracy, they spin the news to engineer support. They are spin dictators.” / Source
- Empty promises: “Dictatorships often have the power to sacrifice entire generations in the name of a future paradise, whether under communism or the market. However, dictatorships have no mechanisms to guarantee that these sacrifices will not simply lead to even more sacrifices.” / Source
- Systematic state violence: “One of us has been beaten, blacklisted and forced into exile by operatives of the Kremlin. …The other author has seen his mother shot by Venezuelan security forces and his first cousin languish for nearly three years in a military jail as a prisoner of conscience.” / Source
- Declining innovation (oh, and famine): “Dictator-led countries have higher rates of mental illness, lower levels of health and life expectancy, and, as Amartya Sen famously argued, higher susceptibility to famine. Their citizens are less educated and file fewer patents.” / Source
- Dissenters murdered and maimed: “Maduro is tossing political opponents in prison. He is cracking down on growing street protests with lethal force, with government security forces killing at least 46 demonstrators in recent months. He has repeatedly postponed regional government elections in order to stave off threats to his party’s power.” / Source
- Sham elections: “You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.” / Source
- More sick people: “Recent research has shown a surprisingly close association between the extent of political freedom and several measures of population health, after adjusting for economic factors.” / Source
- 24-7 fear: “In 1973 and 1974 the atmosphere among the people I knew – students, journalists, intellectuals, artists, workers, etc. – was very sombre. We were scared, almost paralyzed by fear. Most people didn’t want to get in trouble, just go on with their lives in a quiet way, keeping a low profile. There was almost no information, only rumours. We heard about torture centres, concentration camps, assassinations, raids in poor neighbourhoods, how thousands were arrested and many more had fled the country, but there was no way of confirming these rumours.” / Source
- Corruption and ineptitude: “Something’s wrong with the water, sewage, garbage collection, a pothole. Your child is being bullied at school or the police ignored violence to family or friends. KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. Complain, and the so-called public official would likely have his hand out. You’d feel lucky if all he wanted was money, not your wife, son or daughter. Life under dictatorship can be hell – not figurative hell but hell on earth. … Republicans complain about the ‘deep state.’ They’re complaining about rules. Bureaucracy is about carrying out rules. Rules in a democracy are based on legislation – not arbitrary orders and demands but what bureaucrats are supposed to do.” / Source
- Meaningless lives: “Then he grasped my right hand with both of his hands and I will never forget those hazel eyes as he departed saying, ‘I am doomed.’ He turned and vanished off into the crowd. Many times I have wondered about that young man and whatever happened to him.” / Source
- Mass stupidity: “For me, the worst thing under that regime was the lack of free information. Every single information source was controlled, and that kept people stupid and vulnerable. Information is one of the most valuable goods and keeping people uninformed makes them easy to rule and manipulate.” / Source
- Violence the norm: “During the first 30 days after the coup, Chilean soldiers had to have the right armband and the right password. I was eating ice cream at Copelia in Providencia, the rich neighborhood and soldiers just came in and cut the hair of boys and tore the pants of girls, before dragging some off to waiting buses.There were bullet holes in at least half the windows at the Hotel Carrera, where most foreign journalists were staying. It was the first time many people will have seen dead bodies openly displayed, floating down the Mapocho river, or lying in the street.” / Source
- Justifiable paranoia: “Digging deeper, we lived in a constant fear that if we say something against the regime the police or the security apparatus (secret police) would come after us.” / Source
- Spiritual and intellectual decay via self-censorship: “My mother told me that she was walking in a street on Mexico DF and she suddenly saw graffiti on a wall with the hammer and the sickle. She panicked, she was afraid that she was going to had some problem with the authorities just for walking near a graffiti with the communist emblem.” / Source
- Be obedient or be dead: “It’s great long as you’re on the government’s side of course.” / Source