The opinion section of
The New York Times has just published a
roundtable discussion of the incoming Trump administration, featuring left-leaners Jamelle Bouie, M. Gessen, and Lydia Polgreen, along with token right-winger Ross Douthat. Patrick Healy is the moderator. The teaser headline on the
front page of the
Times is "What If It Gets Really Bad? Four Columnists Debate Trump’s Approach to Power."
It's a frustrating discussion, because while Bouie, Gessen, and Polgreen expect the Trump presidency to be authoritarian, they're also upset about likely consequences of Trump's election that aren't technically authoritarian but will be Reaganism on steroids. Polgreen, for instance, predicts that
what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are cooking up at their Department of Government Efficiency could cause a tremendous amount of suffering very quickly. Sharp, thoughtless cuts to Medicaid, for example, will have an immediate effect on the health and well-being of millions of poor Americans, especially children. Not to mention the economic impact of throwing potentially millions of federal workers out of work. The government would save money on salaries, but individual communities across the country would lose earners who contribute to the overall economy in many ways. It is all just so heedless.
All this gives Douthat an opening to be the contrarian who argues that the Trump presidency might not be authoritarian. At one point, Healy asks Douthat:
... I wonder, when you look at the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Kennedy or the now withdrawn Matt Gaetz — people who seem to see the state as the enemy and give off authoritarian vibes in different respects — do you see any signs of darkness ahead?
Douthat replies:
In what sense do you think that Kennedy, whose potpourri of positions combine old-school lefty critiques of everything from nuclear power to big pharma with libertarian-inflected support for alternative medicine, psychedelics and fad diets, gives off “authoritarian vibes”? His most deplorable position is his anti-vaccine advocacy, which has nothing authoritarian about it; it’s a form of crunchy libertarianism taken to a regrettable extreme. Not everything unwise or reckless can be collapsed into the category of creeping authoritarianism; there are plenty of errors that run in the opposite direction!
Later, Gessen defines Robert Kennedy as an authoritarian because ... he rejects mainstream science. I don't like Douthat, but saying this makes his job very easy:
Gessen: ... let’s agree that one aspect of authoritarian government is decision-making by one person or a small group of people, outside of any transparent deliberative process. This is what makes Kennedy’s wacky positions on things such as vaccines “authoritarian” — it’s not what he thinks, necessarily; it’s his rejection of expertise and the deliberation that has produced existing policies.
Douthat: I’ll just say again that I don’t think the rejection of expertise is authoritarian — if so, then Americans have always been authoritarian — unless it is enforced by actual dictatorial means.
None of the panelists seem to realize that Kennedy
has made expressly authoritarian threats.
I told you about this in April 2023, just after Kennedy, who at the time was a presidential candidate, made clear that he was prepared to bring criminal charges against government health officials and editors of medical journals whose positions differ from his.
In a
Twitter thread, Kennedy reassured us that he didn't intend to be vindictive against Anthony Fauci and other government health officials if he was elected president.
It is dawning on mainstream figures like Anthony Fauci that their Covid policies were a public health disaster. Lots of us are angry about the mandates, the lockdowns, the censorship, the insanity. But we need to avoid the toxic quagmire of retribution and blame and focus on ensuring this never happens again. Clean up the regulatory agencies, get corporate money out of public health, and guarantee free, open, uncensored public and scientific discourse.
But then he immediately withdrew the olive branch:
Of course, officials who betrayed the public trust must not be allowed to hold power. I will remove them from their positions and, if laws were broken, my attorney general will prosecute.
Just to be clear, I will prosecute any official who engaged in criminal wrongdoing during the pandemic.....
As President, I will direct my attorney general to investigate and prosecute every person who knowingly defrauded or deceived the American public about the safety and efficacy of medical products and I will obtain justice and compensation for every American who was injured or suffered the death of family members from those actions.
Kennedy has
called the COVID vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made." He said in this thread that he was eager to "prosecute every person who knowingly defrauded or deceived the American public about the safety and efficacy of medical products." You do the math.
And he seemed eager to prosecute the editors of medical journals:
Kennedy's words:
I'll bring all the medical journals -- The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA -- into the Justice Department, as soon as I appoint an AG, and I'll say to them, "You guys are part of a racketeering syndicate. You're collaborating with this pharmaceutical industry, lie to the American public about the efficacy and safety of these products, and you're causing enormous harm, and we are going to sue you both civilly, for damages, and we're going to sue you criminally, unless you come up with a plan right now for how you're going to stop doing that.
Apparently, no one in the
Times discussion remembers any of this.
*****
In this discussion, it's remarkable how long it takes panelists
who work for a newspaper to mentions Trumpworld's threats to the press. It's only near the end of the discussion that Gessen warns of "media capture (e.g., bringing media outlets to heel by exerting pressure on owners, often using their other business interests)." Polgreen invokes an aspect of Narendra Modi's authoritarianism in India: "Intimidate the press through legal harassment and by threatening owners’ other business interests." You'd think the panelists would be very focused on this, given the fact that Trump recently
sued CBS for $10 billion because, he claims, CBS edited a
60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and Trump's attorneys also
sent a letter to the
Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages because, according to the letter "false and defamatory statements" appeared in
Times articles by Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, as well as in a Penguin Random House book written by Buettner and Craig.
And now there's this:
... Elon Musk shared a bawdy meme on his X platform that joked about tapping into his deep pockets to purchase MSNBC....
MSNBC’s parent company Comcast ... has been eyeing plans to spin off nearly all of its cable channels into a company dubbed SpinCo. Other channels in the group include CNBC, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and the Golf Channel....
The tech mogul also joked about purchasing Twitter (now X) for years before he actually pulled the trigger.
“How much is it?” he asked in 2017 on the platform.
Here are some of the relevant tweets:
This might have happened after the roundtable took place -- but the Trump lawsuit and the threatening letter were already old news, as was the apparent intimidation that led
The Washington Post and the
Los Angeles Times to withdraw their Kamala Harris endorsements. Now the intimidation is happening live on Elon Musk's platform. I'm sorry no one asked Douthat why all this isn't already fascism, or at least fascist in intent.
