WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A DEMAGOGUE

By Robert P. Bomboy

President Donald Trump is a demagogue, the first demagogue ever to sit in the White House.

            It's no secret. Everybody knows it.

            Books describe a demagogue as a leader in a democracy who gains popularity by exploiting prejudice and ignorance, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation. Demagogues have usually advocated immediate, violent action to address a national crisis while accusing moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness or disloyalty. Demagogues overturn established customs of political conduct. They exploit a fundamental, if usually unrecognized, weakness in democracies: because the people hold the ultimate power, nothing stops the people from giving that power to someone who appeals to the lowest common denominator of a large segment of the population.

That certainly sounds like Donald Trump.

As Michael Signer, the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a lecturer at the University of Virginia, points out: "Demagogues know they’re getting away with something shameless." President Trump's chief henchman, Steve Bannon, delights in saying, "It only helps us when . . . . they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

           

Any political scientist can name the four traits of demagogues and the four very real dangers they pose when they come to power.

1.     They imperil their countries in the international arena.
President Trump has already escalated tensions abroad and created unnecessary and dangerous hostilities against America.

2.     Demagogues typically surround themselves with incompetent and dangerous advisers.
While he was a candidate, President Trump pledged - perhaps unnecessarily - to "drain the swamp," but instead he appointed millionaires, lobbyists, and cronies, the least of whom were General Michael Flynn (whom he fired in disgrace within a month), Steve Bannon (who boasts that he wants to "destroy

the government,") and Jeff Sessions (whose reputation is tarnished).

3.     Demagogues, like President Trump, who ascend to power by manipulating the passions of their followers, often fall prey to passions of their own.
What else are the President's lies and tweetstorms?

4.     Demagogues like Trump threaten dissenters in an effort to silence them, as the President has done in his raging, out of control campaigns against the press.

President Trump's demagoguery bodes ill for our representative democracy and our deeply-rooted faith in constitutional principles. Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who has become a smash hit on Broadway, warned long ago that American democracy could be destroyed by demagogues who would “mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”

            What can a demagogue do?

            The nation's most influential scholars, historians, economists, political scientists at the highest levels of our best universities, are gravely concerned, especially by the President's continuing attacks on the federal courts, which - under the Constitution - represent the strongest of the checks and balances that undergird our democracy.

On February 4, President Trump vehemently railed against Judge James Robart the federal judge in Seattle who blocked the first immigration ban, calling him a "so-called judge" and questioning his credentials. He tweeted worldwide: "Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens, blame him and court system."

Before that, during his campaign, Trump had previously maligned another federal judge. In a campaign speech last June, he devoted 12 full minutes to a personal attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding in a class-action lawsuit against Candidate Trump and his Trump University. In the broadside, Trump ranted that Judge Curiel was a Mexican, even though he was born in Indiana.

In America we don't have "so-called judges." We don't have orange judges or teal judges, red judges, blue judges, or gold judges. We don't have Mexican or Jamaican judges. We have jurists in our federal courts who take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Observers see the President's lashing out at these federal judges and the judiciary, in general, as the calculated attacks of a demagogue ready to profit from crisis.

"If Trump assumes that there will be a bad terrorist attack on his watch," says Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, "blaming judges now will deflect blame and enhance his power more than usual after the next attack."

He is setting up the judiciary to be blamed for any attack on the United States. "The lower his poll numbers, the more outlandish his lies, the greater the resistance from opponents within the bureaucracies, the thicker his scandals and chaos," adds Mark Danner, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. "The likelier he will be to use a crisis and all the opportunities it offers to lever himself from a position of defensiveness to that of dominating power."       

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