Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,29

a metric, gets to decide what constitutes extreme speech, even the most mainstream conservative outlets can become a target.

There are plenty of fascist policies coming from outside the Trump administration. Trump may occasionally talk the authoritarian talk, but it’s the left that walks the authoritarian walk.

Branding Trump as a fascist is not about fascism. It’s about grabbing power. Even the Democrats’ most loyal allies in the press know it. Salon cynically warned, “Branding Trumpism Fascist has the political benefit of mobilizing disparate forces in the fight against him just like the antifascist coalition of World War II led to unprecedented alliances between ideologically disparate forces (the Soviet-American alliance being the primary example). In the American context, seeing Trump as a 2016 reincarnation of Mussolini can unite Democrats, Republicans, independents, Naderites, neo-cons, constitutionalists, and others, into a broad anti-Fascist coalition which would bring Trump down and save our democracy.”

Of course, Democrats aren’t so much focused on saving democracy as they are on saving their own power. They will pay any price—scratch that—they will ask you to pay any price to make that happen.

Case in point: President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to provide funding for a border wall. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called President Trump’s use of that authority an example of “fascist” behavior. Prior to the House vote on the resolution blocking the emergency declaration, Nancy Pelosi said, “Perhaps it’s time for our country to have a civics lesson. Our founders rejected the idea of a monarch.” That’s all well and good, except for one problem: Pelosi doesn’t believe in rejecting a powerful executive and neither do her Democrat colleagues in Congress, who uniformly cheered President Obama’s use of pen and phone to avoid traditional checks and balances by the legislative branch.

The dead giveaway can be found in the resolution blocking Trump’s national emergency. It blocks the president’s ability to reprogram authorized funds in this specific case. It does nothing to rein in future presidents—a move for which there would be strong bipartisan support.

This is about blocking this president, this time. The last thing Nancy Pelosi wants is to rein in the executive authority upon which Democrat presidents have relied to bypass legislative checks and balances.

The casualty in all of this is foundational institutions that have been key to the success of the world’s most successful economy. Many of the articles warning of Trump’s fascism warned of potential damage to our democratic institutions. But a more careful look at institutions from the Electoral College to the First Amendment and from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice shows the real damage is coming not from President Trump’s allies but from his political enemies. Much of it begins in Congress.

Chapter 4

Creating False Narratives

Two years after her devastating defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton stood before a Selma, Alabama, crowd and attempted to explain why she isn’t the president of the United States. She offered one simple reason. “I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act and I will tell you, it makes a really big difference,” Clinton said.

We have heard Clinton offer a bevy of reasons for her loss, but this was a new one. Affecting her best southern accent, Clinton clumsily attempted to construct a narrative that would conform to the formula her party had successfully used for years. It is a formula that weaponizes public consensus—in this case the consensus against racism—and attempts to cast political opponents as coming down on the wrong side of that consensus.

She explained that people she referred to as opponents of the half-century-old law had “found a receptive Supreme Court” that “gutted the Voting Rights Act.” She then proceeded to spin a narrative that attributed her electoral defeat to voters in Wisconsin who she says were turned away from the polls “because of the color of their skin, because of their age, because of whatever excuse could be made up to stop a fellow American citizen from voting.”

There was a problem with this narrative. It just flat out was not true. The Supreme Court decision to which Clinton was referring, Shelby Co. Ala. v. Holder, applied only to nine states, mostly in the Deep South. It did not apply to Wisconsin. Even Salon, one of the premier outlets for Democratic Party propaganda, called Clinton out. Their story cited legal experts who explained that the key states in Clinton’s loss (Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) were not even covered by