P. Raman
Fear of Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office has triggered much consternation among the US intelligentsia and mainstream media. Many in the US believe that if Trump wins the November 2024 elections, he would “reshape the executive branch as a tool of autocracy”.
A surge of articles, commentaries and interviews in the US media reflects lingering fears among enlightened public opinion. A reassured Trump during his second term will fill regulatory bodies with his cronies and silence his critics with brute force, the critics warn.
Steven Levitsky, professor and author of How Democracies Die, says: “Trump is going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances agains people… he is going to come in as an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”
“Trump has long said he would seek retribution against his opponents if he wins another term in the White House in 2024 – a vow he made again at a campaign rally Friday in South Dakota,” CNN reported, quoting Trump’s own words:
“That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general. I say, listen, indict him. Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong that we know of – I don’t know, indict him on income tax evasion, you’ll figure it out,” Trump said.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and its Discontents, says: “In his second term, even a politicised Bureau of Labour Statistics’s monthly job reports or Centre’s for Disease Control and Prevention could become suspect. Do you want people who believe in hydroxychloroquine making decisions?” he asks.
Hydroxychloroquine was a reference to the way Trump had promoted the unproven efficacy of the medicine against COVID-19. The idea had to be subsequently abandoned.
His first act will be to fire the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director and politicise the FBI as well as National Security Council, Larry Diamond of Stanford University says. Then he will fill all positions with his own men. During his last term, many officials had resigned in protest.
An article in The Washington Post quoted Trump saying in September last: “The FBI and Justice Department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical left scoundrels, lawyers and media.” Obviously, he intends filling these posts with his loyalists.
Trump allies want to overhaul the federal bureaucracy. They are already working on replacing civil servants with like-minded officials. Trump’s move in this regard in 2020 was cancelled by the Biden administration. Now he will revive it.
Most observers see Trump encouraging racist and white supremacist movements for support. Jennifer McCoy, political science professor, who studied political changes in several countries, says “pernicious polarisation” always led to electoral autocracy.
Donald Trump at Conservative Political Action Conference, 2024. Photo: X (Twitter).
David Becker, executive director of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research, warns about the collapse of consensus. Federal relations under an arrogant Trump will get worse. He asks: “Why are we sending more taxes for every federal dollar we are getting back.” Some even talk of the possibility of civil war.
Trump would ban foreign Muslims from entering the US and changing the census questionnaire to intimidate the Hispanics. He would target people who are legally living in the US but harbour ‘Jihadist sympathies’ and reimpose the ban on people entering from seven Islamic countries.
It is feared that Trump will weaponise the federal government and punish critics and opponents and derail campaigns by political rivals by using the Justice Department as a dirty tricks shop. He talks openly about jailing journalists. He has also promised he would revise school curricula to ensure ‘patriotic education’ and have a system to certify ‘patriotic teachers’ so that students learn “to love their country, not hate.”
Trump’s ‘good friend’ has shown the way
Narendra Modi has been a close friend of Donald Trump. At Houston in September 2019, he greeted the former with ‘Howdy Modi’ and both leaders praised each other’s work. Modi had just won a second term and Trump was trying for his.
In an interview, Trump called Modi a “good friend” and “a great guy doing terrific job”. Speaking to a crowd of Indian-American supporters, Modi said ‘ab ki bar, Trump Sarkar’ (‘now is the time for a Trump administration). But when this led to a controversy in the US, his foreign minister, S Jaishankar, came out with a denial.
Apart from such mutual praise, both of them advocate right-wing policies and represent the trend towards electoral autocracy. Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) is akin to Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat and Hindutva’s romantic vision of the past. Such themes inspire the followers of both leaders.
“Perhaps their greatest commonality is their adherence to a familiar autocratic playbook, the likes of which has been adopted by other democratically elected leaders around the world… Their illiberal tendencies offer some insight into what a democracy in autocratic transition might look like,” writes Yasmeen Serhan.
However, there are also many dissimilarities in the working style of the two elected dictators. Consider the following.
- Unlike Trump, Modi is a relatively smooth and smart operator with an eye for details. Trump proclaims that he would remove all ‘radical left scoundrels’ entrenched in crucial positions in the FBI and other departments in government. But Modi tamed all statutory watchdog panels and key academic centres like the Central Vigilance Commission, Central Information Commission, CAG, NSSO, the Indian Statistical Institute, the Nehru Library within his first year in office. This was done quietly, by filling crucial posts with his loyalists. It took more time to contain the Reserve Bank of India, headed by more redoubtable economists. Modi tried to control the judiciary through the hurriedly passed National Judicial Appointments Commission Act. Under the NJAC, a panel filled with his own men was to select judges, including the chief Justice. However, the act was struck down by the Supreme Court.
- What they in the US describe as ‘pernicious polarisation’ has been Modi’s chief winning strategy from the start. He uses communal incidents as a strategy to maintain a perpetually divisive vote bank. A Lokniti survey found that the percentage of majoritarian voters in India rose from 40 to 50 between the 2004 and 2019 Lok Sabha polls (IE article June 26, 2019). BJP’s target is to raise it to 60%.
- Trump promises firm actions against Muslims. Modi’s onslaught against Muslims is more extensive and at two levels. Legislative: Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), common civil code as in Uttarakhand, triple talaq and polygamy ban. On the ground, It is a long list: ban or attack on madrasas, mazars, crackdown on halal shops, bulldozer justice, and attacks on Muslim shops and Muslim hawkers.All this generates communal tension and an assured Hindutva vote bank.
- Trump proposes to punish critics and opponents by weaponing federal powers: But Modi has been systematically using the ED, CBI and tax powers to harass, arrest and disrupt legitimate political activities of the opposition. Even chief ministers and ministers of states are confined to jail for long periods. Government admitted in parliament that between 2018 and 2023, 701 cases of sedition registered and 5023 cases filed and 8,947 people were arrested under the draconian UAPA alone.
- US critics warn about worsening federal relations under an arrogant Trump: Modi has already done so. He singled out the opposition states in the allocation of funds and imposed the PM schemes without providing major benefits. Earlier this year, opposition CMs protested in Delhi. There were similar actions by the MPs. The Karnataka CM alleged that the state has lost Rs. 40,000 cr of their share in four years. It was alleged that South Indian states states receive only 25 per cent of the share of tax they earn while UP was allotted 200 per cent.
- Trump’s ‘patriotic’ agenda and plans for school curriculum changes: In this regard, Modi has gone ahead pretty fast. He has already introduced school textbooks in a Hindutva format, removed the Mughals and renowned Muslims personalities and excessively romanticized Hindu heroes. Universities have been filled with likeminded people.
- Francis Fukuyama’s fears about data fudging: Trump can certainly learn from our Vishwaguru on withholding adverse data (Household Consumption Expenditure Survey 2017-18) and sacking officers who refuse to ‘cooperate’. International agencies like the ILO have criticised the fall in quality of India’s statistical data.
The Trump-Modi analogy has an alarming subtext. The US media during the Trump years had valiantly tackled the regime’s brinkmanship. But in Modi’s India, there has been a failure of the Indian mainstream media and the bulk of the intelligentsia to rise to the occasion and resist the systematic dismantling of structures of democracy. As L.K. Advani had famously said about the media in the Emergency, when asked to bend, they crawled. But the same is true of the BJP, which earlier took its internal democracy quite seriously. Within the BJP, the leaders Adani had groomed are now merrily colluding with Modi and the RSS has also fallen in line. With the kind of complete control he has over his own and over all institutions and the media, Modi can now claim to be the Vishwaguru of electoral dictators.
source : thewire