One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”Trump is an authoritarian thug who's perfectly comfortable ruining other people's lives in order to get what he wants, but he's not the worst imaginable authoritarian, for one reason in particular: It's all a game for him.
Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”
As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do.
He wants to win all the time, but sometimes he loses, and sometimes he shrugs and accepts that. He reworked his tariffs to be in compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. At long last, he cut a check to E. Jean Carroll (though he's now trying to claw the money back).
If pressure from his adminstration destroys CBS News or (perhaps sometime next year) CNN, terrific. If not, we'll, that's how the game goes (though he won't stop fighting). He'll show up at next year's dinner and make nice with everyone he tried to bring to ruin.
All his life, Trump has fought dirty, but often he didn't win -- the courts, the political system, or, most often, the marketplace defeated him. His businesses went bankrupt. Many lenders wouldn't lend to him. Oh well, what can you do.
He's dangerous now because a Supreme Court full of partisan hacks and a party-over-country congressional GOP have given him near-unlimited power, but he spent most of his life not having this level of power. He's used to that. He's destroyed a lot of guardrails, but he's left some standing. He hasn't disbanded the lower courts that have ruled against him. He hasn't put Khadeeja Safdar in the gulag.
We'll have a Republican president someday who won't be so restrained.
President Vance or President Bovino or President Carlson will take the power granted by the Supreme Court and congressional Republicans and treat it as merely a baseline. A future GOP fascist president won't see authoritarianism as just a power game in which you respect your opponents and assume they're fighting dirty just like you. A future fascist will fight for all the power, with nothing but contempt for anyone standing in the way.
Unless we fascism-proof the country starting in 2029 (or 2027), or fight like hell when an even worse Republican president is in office.
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