Donald Trump wants to Putinize the presidency

If you don't believe Republicans are behind him all the way, just ask Liz Cheney.

Here is yet another appeal to all those who haven’t subscribed to do so now. The Lucian Truscott Newsletter needs your help!

Trump claimed the 2016 presidential election was “rigged” against him right up until the day he won.  He did the same thing last year, only this time, he continued his charges that the election had been “rigged” because he lost.  What Donald Trump wants is a system of elections rigged so he cannot lose.

Sound familiar?  It’s the exact system enjoyed by his idol, Vladimir Putin, in Russia, who has already spent some two decades as president of Russia in one form or another.  With amendments to the Russian constitution passed by parliament last year and confirmed by a referendum supposedly approved by 78 percent of the electorate, Putin, whose latest six-year term expires in 2024, will be able to stay in power at least until 2036.

Changes to Russia’s electoral system weren’t the only amendments passed, however.  Have a look at what else they did.  They passed an amendment to the Russian constitution banning same sex marriage, and another affirming the Russian people’s belief in God.  Kind of a right-wing wish list in this country, wouldn’t you think? 

Donald Trump is sitting down there in his post-presidential quarters in Mar a Lago, and he’s doing one thing:  he’s pushing the lie that the election of 2020 was stolen from him by Joe Biden and the Democrats.  He has made fealty to that lie the only loyalty test that matters in the Republican Party.  This is because the lie that the election was “rigged” against him has allowed an all-out effort by Republicans to rig election laws in the other direction:  against Democrats and for Donald Trump when he runs again in 2024.

All he cares about is getting himself back in residence in the Oval Office.  He doesn’t really care what the Republican Party does once that’s accomplished.  He likes the perks.  He loved being able to get in Air Force One any time he wanted and fly off to a golf course of his choosing.  He loved flying off to a hold a rally 6 states away and then flying back to the White House, pretty much all of it on the tax payer’s dime.  And he loved using the powers of the state to line his own pockets and those of his sons and daughters.  Donald Trump had stopped running his company, the Trump Organization, as a business that actually did things like build buildings and run hotels, so he welcomed the opportunity of running another kind of business, the United States government, for his own benefit.  Even now, Trump’s political fund raising operation is run more for his own personal benefit than for that of the Republican Party.  He has consistently exhorted his followers to donate to his personal PAC rather than to conventional fund-raising arms such as the Republican National Committee and the House and Senate campaign committees.

He's doing, in short, what Vladimir Putin does:  running for office in order to enrich himself and keep himself in the perks of power.

Yesterday I described Trump as the “Big Mac Munching Machiavelli of Mar a Lago,” and a number of commenters took issue with my comparison of Trump to Machiavelli because the former is stupid and the later was smart.  But you don’t have to be a genius to apply Machiavelli’s rules of how to stay in power.  Machiavelli believed that it was far better for a ruler to be feared than loved.  The way Trump presided over the political murder of Liz Cheney seems to reflect that principle to a proverbial “T.”  How many Republican office holders or office seekers do you think will go up against him now that he’s knocked Congresswoman Cheney from her leadership post?  He’s got his sights set on endorsing and helping to fund someone to run against her in Wyoming next year, too. 

Machiavelli also believed that deceit and fraud were necessary levers of power and that violence was justified in other to consolidate a ruler’s hold on power.  If that doesn’t sound like someone familiar, I don’t know what does.

But selling the lie that the last election was unfair only takes him so far.  That’s why the lies have gotten more and more bizarre, from Democratic pedophile rings to “they’re going to take away our guns” to conspiracies involving Chinese communists and dead foreign dictators.  Now they are field-testing the lie that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t violent, it was just another visit by a bunch of curious tourists.  Next we’re going to hear that the prosecutions of insurrectionists are unfair or illegitimate.  They’re going to attack the “Democrat run” Department of Justice as misusing its law enforcement powers for political purposes.  Just watch them.

Behind it all is a big push by Republicans to get enough states together to call a constitutional convention.  According to Common Cause, there are already 27 states with Article V convention applications to consider a balanced budget amendment.  They’re going to try to hold votes next year in Kentucky, Idaho, Montana, and South Carolina, all GOP controlled states, to sign onto the so-called balanced budget amendment constitutional convention. 

There is also another effort backed by the Mercer family and ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an allegedly social welfare group masquerading as a non-profit that is in reality a front for arch-conservatives.  They want to put together a so-called “convention of states” to consider other changes to the U.S. Constitution beside the balanced budget amendment.  It’s headed-up by a cast of droolers including former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, also a former president of the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation.  In 2016, they got together and held a mock convention.  In a preview of their dreams, the practice convention considered amendments that would permanently ban abortion rights and turn back the clock on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as “socialism.”  So far they’ve signed up 15 states in an attempt to convene this right-wing dream convention.

That’s what the 361 Republican bills to limit voting rights are all about.  They want to control enough states that they can rewrite the United States Constitution so it’s more to their liking.  How does four terms with Donald Trump as president sound to you?  How about some constitutionally mandated controls on voting rights?  How about doing away with the “birthright” citizenship that’s the law of the land in our current constitution?  Not to mention an amendment making abortion murder and another one turning Social Security into a “volunteer” program.

This is how Trump and the Republicans want to hold onto power:  They know they don’t have the numbers to run and win elections, so they are setting for a plan to control elections the same way Vladimir Putin does under the Russian constitution.  We can only guess how many times Trump and Putin have talked on the phone since he left office, comparing notes and planning for a future only they know about.