In 1935, Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, his thought-provoking novel about an America under the iron heel of a fascist dictatorship. Today, millions of Americans fear that Lewis’ fiction of 1935 could become the fact of 2025 if Donald Trump is inaugurated for a second term in the White House. Lewis wrote in 1935 that America was “ripe for a dictatorship,” and his words of warning then are relevant now as this nation prepares for a 2024 election contest between Trump and Joe Biden.
The Atlantic is a venerable magazine that has been published since 1857, when James Buchanan was president. In its January/February issue The Atlantic devotes its pages to the theme “If Trump Wins.” The issue’s 24 essays provide a chilling look at what will very likely be in store for this nation during a second Trump term when, to paraphrase poet William Butler Yeats, a rough beast slouches toward Washington to be reborn.
In one of The Atlantic’s essays, writer David Frum decries a “revenge presidency” from Donald redux. “If Trump wins the presidency again,” writes Frum, “the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.” Frum adds that Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that this country is “a republic, if you can keep it” was a warning that “ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them.”
In her essay, Juliette Kayyem writes that extremists will be emboldened by a second Trump administration. “Both he and his most disreputable supporters will feel vindicated,” she warns. “The Republican Party has already given Trump a pass for exhorting a mob to break into the Capitol. In turn, Trump has promised to pardon many of the January 6 insurrectionists. His forgiveness could extend to extremist leaders convicted on federal charges.” Indeed, at his rallies Trump has recently referred to the Jan. 6 prisoners as “hostages” rather than the convicts that they are, and he has mentioned pardons for the insurrectionists if he regains the reins of power.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Senior reminds readers that “a would-be totalitarian wants a republic of the indifferent,” while in the same issue, journalist Mark Leibovich says, “Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent.”
That incumbent, Joe Biden, has finally started taking the gloves off in his campaign speeches, but it may be too late to forestall four more years of Trump’s trumpery. Speaking on the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 MAGA mob’s assault on Capitol Hill, President Biden said, “You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.” He warned that “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.” A few days later, the president spoke at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina, where a young white supremacist gunned down Black worshipers in 2015. “Without light there’s no path from this darkness,” Biden told his audience at the historic church.
The path is indeed dark, and despite Biden’s address to the Charleston church crowd, many Americans who call themselves Christians have become disciples of the Trump cult. A recent video titled “God Made Trump” posted on Trump’s Truth Social network paints the former president as some sort of new messiah. How quickly some self-anointed evangelicals forget the biblical admonition against “selling their birthright for a mess of pottage.”
Trump’s coziness with and admiration for authoritarian regimes around the world and his vow to his supporters to be “your retribution” is a dark portent of future fascism. Trump critic and former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney may have been right when she warned last year that Americans could be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” of the kind that Sinclair Lewis cautioned about in 1935. It can happen here.
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