Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,24
Trump made Blue America apoplectic with rage and fear. Over-the-top reactions have flourished everywhere on social media and in news reports since the moment he became the Republican nominee. The forces opposing President Trump were looking to reverse what they saw as the disastrous outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
In the months between the election and the inauguration, while I was still serving as the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, some groups (probably nonprofit advocacy groups) saw that committee as one tool to make it happen. They promptly messaged their grass roots to call and demand investigations of the president-elect.
I don’t know that firsthand—I just know that when you get hundreds of phone calls all using the exact same words in the exact same order to demand the exact same thing, there’s probably an advocacy group involved somewhere. I had the authority to investigate the president-elect in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic defeat. Reporters who had ignored our substantive investigations of the Obama administration for years suddenly came out of the woodwork to inquire about even the most far-fetched or benign allegations against Donald Trump.
The calls pouring in from the public included dire warnings about the “authoritarian” or “fascist” America had just elected. Over and over again those two words came up—authoritarian, fascist. Believing those words were accurate, Democrats demanded Congress intervene to prevent this man from being sworn in as president.
They weren’t accurate. A common definition of an authoritarian is someone who enforces strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. That’s a serious charge. The definition of fascism is more flexible, but the textbook definition of fascism is a system characterized by the following: centralization of authority, dictatorship, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
It’s hard to see how a philosophy of smaller government, deregulation, federalism, and tax cuts can be depicted as aligning with a fascist agenda. Many of the allegations against President Trump hinged on the nationalism component of the definition. Because Trump had an America-first agenda and campaigned on border security, that allegedly made him a racist xenophobe.
What did Blue America most fear a President Donald Trump would do? Believe it or not, the most common warnings from callers to my office predicted that he would curtail the freedoms of LGBTQ people and people of color. The callers we heard from were also certain he would use the power of government to take out his political enemies (particularly Hillary Clinton), feather his own nest, destroy our free press, crash our economy, and take us into needless wars.
To date, none of that has happened. The predictions were not even remotely close to the truth. Though President Trump undeniably makes comments that are construed by leftists as nationalistic (as when he prioritizes illegal immigration and putting America first), those comments align with the views of many past presidents from both parties. He has not in fact governed like a fascist at all. In fact, President Trump has done more or less the exact opposite of most of the things fearmongers told us we should be worried about.
Whatever a person may think of Donald Trump’s personality, weighing his results against the presumed agenda of a fascist dictator reveals few similarities. Law-abiding Americans have not had their freedom curtailed under this president. To the contrary, the forces of oppressive government have been lightened. On the other hand, Democrats have promoted an agenda heavy on force, willingly exacting a price in personal freedom.
As for the LGTBQ community, their freedoms remain intact under a Trump presidency. Some LGBTQ activist groups would certainly prefer someone who, like President Obama, puts more restrictions on the freedom of those who disagree with them. They would like more Obama-era restrictions on vulnerable women who don’t want to be forced to share public bathrooms with transgender women. They would prefer restrictions against health-care workers with a religious objection to performing sex reassignment surgery. But those policies do not restrict freedom of LGBTQ people—they protect the freedoms of others. Furthermore, we have to acknowledge the work of this administration to decriminalize homosexuality in seventy-one countries. The U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, the highest-ranking openly gay official in the history of Republican administrations, leads the global effort.
Much to the chagrin of some Republicans, Trump hasn’t reflexively targeted and jailed his political adversaries, even when his administration could have justifiably done so. Nor has he pardoned political allies who have been