Capitulating to Trump, American Elites Follow a History of Autocratic Enabling that Doesn't End Well
Welcome back to Lucid. Those looking for the video of the Dec. 13 Q&A with journalist Aaron Rupar will find it below the paywall at the bottom of this post. I am having oral surgery this week and so there will be no live Q&A. Instead, you can send me questions at contact.ruthbenghiat@gmail.com and I will answer some of them in a post to be published this weekend. Our next live Q&A for paying subscribers will take place on Friday, Dec. 27, 1-2pmET. Lucid continues through the holiday season!
If you’re new to Lucid, we have these gatherings every week, and a wonderful community has formed around them. For the first half of the hour, I speak or have a conversation with a guest, and then for the second half we open it up to questions. If you’d like to join us, you can sign up as paying or upgrade to paid here:
______________
Elites have repeatedly made alliances with autocrats. Elites retain power and privileges, and have the potential to expand their profits, in return for supporting the autocrat no matter what he says or does. This support can include legitimizing his policies, helping to spread his propaganda, discouraging criticism of him and his government, and giving him an aura of respectability in the national and international arenas.
Such alliances are seen by elites as insurance against becoming a target of the leader, who often goes after the most powerful just to show that no one is safe. In an established autocracy, any criticism of the leader, or refusals to accept offers of collaboration, can be dangerous.
Many Russian elites who spent years being loyal servants of Russian President Vladimir Putin have met with untimely deaths since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Others have faced prison for resisting hostile takeovers of their businesses by the Kremlin and its allies. In China, even the most powerful people can simply disappear. In Turkey, no one is safe from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s thirst for mass jailing and litigation. Journalists, judges, and businesspeople have gone to prison, and over 150,000 Turks, including a former Olympic swimmer, have been harassed with insult suits.
This comparative context makes the unforced capitulations of many American elites to Trump more puzzling. These individuals live in a democracy and still have freedoms and agency. Yet they are acting almost as though they already live under an autocracy. Even the immensely wealthy, including the world’s second richest man, who would have the resources to deal with whatever comes their way, seem to be pursuing strategies of self-protection that involve obeying in advance.
Instead of uniting and standing up to Trump’s intimidation tactics, they are folding and also backpedaling from actions taken in the past that could be seen as disloyal or contrary to Trumpian and MAGA interests. In doing so, they are helping Trump’s personality cult by already treating him as the dictator he fervently wants to be.
Jeff Bezos is one of the billionaire newspaper owners who refused to have their papers endorse a presidential candidate, for fear that their editorial boards would anger Trump by supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. The other, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, has blocked Los Angeles Times editorials critical of Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions and has requested that his journalists “take a break from writing about Trump” altogether.
Other elites are motivated by greed, or attached to neoliberal visions of government. They see Trump’s presidency as the final push to free government from excessive regulations. They are all for a political system founded on restricting or eliminating the rights of the many, while giving far more liberties to the few. They remember how Trump removed countless checks on the exploitation of the economy, the workforce, and the environment during his first term.
Of course, they ignore informed predictions of the negative outcomes of these and other proposed policies, such as the October 2024 letter signed by 23 Nobel Prize winners that endorsed Harris based on a forecast of volatility for the U.S. and global economy if Trump returned to the White House.
Risk management, cast as pragmatism, also prompts capitulations in the media and business worlds. Some elites see tamping down criticism of the President-elect as a calculated act of harm prevention for themselves and their companies. This is likely part of the reason ABC folded so calamitously to Trump by settling a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump for $15 million, which also stipulated that anchor George Stephanopoulos and ABC apologize to Trump and pay an additional $1 million of Trump’s legal fees.
ABC’s parent company, Disney, is no stranger to autocratic aggressions, having weathered years of harassment from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that started when the company pushed back against the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Debra O’Connell, the Disney executive responsible for ABC News, recently met with Trump’s future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Florida. This is perhaps a larger-scale version of the “we’ve got to work together” pilgrimage of Morning Joe anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to Mar-a-Lago to “reset” relations with Trump.
Republican political and religious elites have long ago found their places in the MAGA landscape. The GOP is now a personal tool of Trump, and is kept in line by him through the autocrat’s classic tools of threat and ritual humiliation. Evangelical Christians, far-right Catholics, and Orthodox Jews have all been summoned to surround the leader with an aura of holiness whenever his corruption and violence have been exposed.
Now Trump and his enablers are leaning on military, national security, and other government elites to get them to support his authoritarian presidency. That means harassing them to cleanse critics from their ranks and censor knowledge of histories and information that might compromise that support.
This is why the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and many GOP members of Congress launched a pressure campaign against the United States Naval Academy in October to disinvite me as a speaker. The History Department of the Naval Academy had chosen me to deliver the prestigious Bancroft Lecture, but then the invitation was retracted, and the lecture postponed indefinitely. 17 members of Congress signed a letter claiming the Naval Academy would be violating the Hatch Act to have a “partisan” historian deliver an anti-Trump lecture, and other Representatives, such as Keith Self of Texas, waged their own campaigns.
The Naval Academy and its aggressors knew that I was not going to speak about Trump, but rather about the fates of militaries governed by authoritarians such as Augusto Pinochet and Putin. The aim of the MAGA mob was to force a public capitulation by the powerful and esteemed Naval Academy. It was a rehearsal for the compromises the military will be asked to make if Trump deploys the armed forces for domestic repression.
Getting everyone to bend the knee is the goal of the autocrat, who gets a special pleasure when the most powerful bow to him and say: I will make your path forward as smooth as possible. I will decline to counter your fictions with inconvenient facts, and I will help you to cleanse your world of critics.
Those who enter into alliances with Trump forget the lessons of history. This portrait in a 1931 book by journalist Curzio Malaparte of how Adolf Hitler treated those who were helping him get into power reminds us that such alliances often end badly.
“He channels his brutality into humbling their pride, crushing their freedom of conscience, diminishing their individual merits and transforming his supporters into flunkeys stripped of all dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise.”