Moldering on my refrigerator door is a browned 3-by-4-inch newsprint clipping of a single frame from Max Fleischer’s animated cartoon “KoKo’s Earth Control”, dated (c.) 1928. In the frame, KoKo the clown is lecturing his dog Fitz about the huge lever imbedded in the wall behind him below a sign proclaiming, “Danger, beware, do not touch earth control! If this handle is pulled, the world will come to an end!”
Now, the absurdity of this scenario (it is, after all, a cartoon) is not just that such an “earth control” could exist, as well as be subject to such vulnerability, but that you just know – given the human race’s propensity for self destruction – some damn fool is going to pull that lever! And in the actual ‘toon, which you can watch on YouTube, someone, of course, does, giving Fleischer an opportunity to demonstrate his enormous artistic talent and fertile imagination. A native of Austro-Poland (he would have been 45 and living in Hollywood when “KoKo’s Earth Control” debuted), perhaps he had an inkling of what was to come in Europe.
Given our world-ending intimations of late, I’ve been given pause to consider KoKo’s parody of the human race’s self-destructive impulses or predisposition to mess up beautiful things that work and have served us well, like our 249-year-old democracy; our scientific and medical research activities that have given us, among other advancements, life-saving vaccines; and our former place of leadership in the world.
Speaking of Donald Trump and his enablers (ahem), I fully understand the authoritarian track the MAGAites are on to transform our American democracy into a dictatorial regime. As an elder born during World War II, I have witnessed enough history to recognize an end-run on democratic norms, including the checks and balances intended by our Founders to ensure political power doesn’t concentrate in the hands of a single individual, i.e., a monarch. Studying systems of government in college, I was educated by emigres, escapees from Iron Curtain countries, who referenced the “dictator’s playbook” in their lectures, a fictitious instruction manual specifying how to take over a government or country.
Trump, et al., are well advanced in actualizing that objective. The process begins by creating a story, an alternate reality, in which the author, group, movement, or political party is perceived as a persecuted minority. Adolph Hitler described his persecution – and that of post-World War I Germany – in his autobiographical screed Mein Kampf (My Struggle). For Trump, a social Brahman born of privilege who has always been rescued from his considerable incompetence by his father or the banks financing his business ventures, it is his constant refrain of victimhood from an imagined conspiracy on the political left. Given Trump’s now total control of the Republican Party, his alt-right cohort has expanded the persecution myth to embrace the entire political right, which claims its freedom of speech rights have been snuffed out by the dominant and corrupt left.
The next step toward total domination is to claim that the state under former leadership has descended into failure and moral depravity and, subsequently, to identify defenseless minorities to blame for it, e.g., undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, the political opposition, etc. (In Nazi Germany, of course, it was Jews, Romanies, and homosexuals.) This can be expanded to include government policies that embrace and enable these groups, such as support for diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI or “woke” sentiments), seen as weakening national resolve and mongrelizing “the people” (in Trump’s universe, Caucasians of northern European descent). The targeted minority then becomes “the other, different from us”, characterized as retarded lower forms of life to be loathed and feared. So identified, the minority can then be accused of “stealing jobs from our people”, having been hired not on merit but to fill woke diversity requirements. It can also be blamed for heinous crimes or terrorist activity, hence Trump’s characterization during his rant at the September conclave of armed forces general staff at Marine Base Quantico as “the enemy within.”
With the story, or myth, established, reality and truth become fungible, tailored to fit the prevailing paradigm, whatever the leader says they are on any given day. Anything that does not support the story must be denied. If, for example, a tenant of the manufactured reality is that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “elitist liberal scientists” – a subterfuge, to support fossil fuel interests – then any evidence to the contrary must be challenged. “You’re imagining it,” the leader might say, “it’s just ‘weather’.”
Since, all forms of communication must align with the bogus reality and its prohibitions, libraries and museums must be purged of books and historical exhibits considered ideologically deviant. Orwellian-style revisionist history must be employed to scrub truthful accounts of present and past events from official registers and replace them with sanitized versions supporting the false narrative, as seen presently at the National Archives and Smithsonian Museums: for example, that American slavery was actually good for the blacks brought to this country against their will and that they were well taken care of by “compassionate” slave owners.
The media, too, must be brought to heel for propagating “fake news”, that is, anything that either questions the leader or supports actual truth. Thus, the oxymoron “alternative facts”, coined to thwart the photographic evidence that Trump’s first inauguration day crowd was considerably smaller than he claimed or that he actually won the 2020 presidential election despite numerous recounts showing he lost. The compulsion to challenge reality – to rewrite history – in the face of irrefutable data can be so compelling it can lead to public “gaslighting”, as when Trump repeatedly told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in a recorded phone conversation, that he carried the state in the 2020 election when presented with the facts from two recounts that he’d lost. “No, you’re wrong, we know we won,” he interrupted whenever Raffensperger brought up the evidence to the contrary. Changing the path of a hurricane on a weather map to suit one of the President’s backers in a southeastern state is another example of gaslighting, or simply spouting lies and gross exaggerations from the podium as he does day after day.
Even entertainment must be policed to be politically correct, especially when comedians exercise their freedom of speech to tease or otherwise criticize the leader or when the showcase national theater’s board must be reorganized and its performance schedule revised to eliminate shows deemed “woke” or featuring too many undesirables of the wrong color, or written and composed by a descendant of a family from a Caribbean territory, i.e., “Hamilton.”
Attorneys general and prosecutors exercising the temerity to seek accountability for the leader’s alleged sexual assaults and business frauds will be attacked in the cowed media and have their political careers destroyed. In some cases, even their lives will be threatened, as was that of the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who stood in the way of his president’s attempt to have active-duty troops fire on demonstrators protesting the lynching of a black man by police during Trump’s first term.
Because authoritarianism is about consolidating absolute power, the wannabe dictator needs to have the subject country’s military solidly behind him. To ensure loyalty, this begins by purging the officer class to eliminate any dissent and intimating to surviving commanders they owe their allegiance first to the maximum leader and his agenda rather than to the Constitution.
Ultimately, the election process – the foundation of democracy – comes under scrutiny, with purging of voter roles, harassment of poll workers, attempts to eliminate mail-in balloting, and other efforts to make voting more difficult. Hand in hand with this is the challenging of voter citizenship and threats to eliminate birthright citizenship.
Finally, the authoritarian state moves against the undesirables, rounding them up, incarcerating them in the contemporary equivalent of concentration camps, and eventually deporting them, in some cases, to countries other than their homelands where they have no connection to the local culture. Families are separated and cruelty becomes institutionalized to terrorize the citizenship as well as the undocumented, or as one observer of Trump’s mass expulsion opined, “Cruelty is what it’s really about.”
So, it is clear to me how the Trumpers are working their way through the dictator’s playbook, systematically knocking down the Founders’ checks and balances toward the ultimate goal of concentrating power in the hands of a would-be monarch, the right-wing dream since FDR, soon to be realized. We’ve seen it from Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s, and more recently, through Putin, Orban, and Erdogan. Always the same recognizable plays, always the same results.
What I have struggled to understand, though, are the policies enacted by Trump and his acolytes that extend beyond authoritarianism and into the realm of stupidity, most prominently, the defunding of research programs at major universities and within the government itself. A prominent example is research studying the existence and causes of climate change, given the Administration’s contention that climate change is a hoax and the leader’s alternate reality, or “official truth”, must be supported. The fruits of this research are vulnerable to deletion, as well, especially data bases accumulated through decades of research. (This is why the more extreme elements of Trump’s social warriors want to abolish the National Weather Service, because since its founding in the 1880s, the agency has maintained the most comprehensive data base on historic weather trends in the world, documenting the steady increase in global warming from the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century until the present.)
And why shut down research programs at the National Institutes of Health, including those investigating causes of certain cancers, so-called “long COVID”, and other diseases? Why curtail general research and development of vaccines, especially the mRNA-based family of COVID inoculations? For that matter, why install a prominent vaccine-denier as NIH Secretary, especially after more than a million Americans died in the recent COVID pandemic, and the world tilts on the virtual edge of another one based on bird flu? Why officially question the viability of polio, measles, and COVID vaccines, when history shows that the first two literally eliminated diseases and the third stopped a world pandemic? Why legitimize the outrageous pronouncements of the NIH Secretary that use of these vaccines, and now, Acetaminophen, a pain-reliever of proven safety, cause autism when thousands of research studies have proven otherwise? And why summarily eject highly experienced and respected physician/researchers from NIH advisory committees and replace them with known medical quacks? How is this “making America healthy again”?
It is obvious that Trump, living in his own reality, has a trepidatious relationship with the truth. Thus, given that the foundation of science is an immutable search for the truth, perhaps this is why Trump is suspicious of research programs and wants to shut them down. They, and the universities that conduct them, also under attack, can bring results – truths – he doesn’t want to hear. This why Vice President JD Vance, who benefited from DEI policies and received scholarships to attend both college and Yale Law School, said, “The universities are the enemy.”
Free speech is a similar issue: people speaking their minds, either vocally or through journalism and literature, expressing things the authoritarian president and his minions do not want to hear, like the late-night TV comedians making fun of Trump and his policies or anyone opposing the misogyny and racism of a recently assassinated right-wing pundit. “The idea that speech or thought contrary to the government line could trigger punishment is the dream of autocrats,” Jonathan Blitzer opined in the September 29 issue of The New Yorker. “Eventually it makes enemies of everyone.”
To ensure that outcome, it is vital to instill fear as widely as possible among the citizenry. Hence Trump’s dispatching troops into cities on the pretense that under Democrat governance the metropolises have degenerated into crime-ridden hellholes. Even if you have vowed as a mental health strategy to cut yourself off from the daily insults of the news cycle, you will not be able to block Trump out – he’ll be in your face constantly in the guise of camouflage-uniformed soldiers carrying loaded M16s down your street. It’s all about instilling terror among the populace, another page in the dictator’s playbook. Hence, also, Trump’s tough-talking, hyper-bro defense secretary renaming his agency the War Department, signifying that America is now at war with its citizenry.
So, life’s machinations of late have me thinking about KoKo and Fitz and their predilection for mischief. We can only hope that, if there really is an “Earth Control”, Donald Trump and his enablers won’t find it. Ignoring climate change alone is sufficient foolishness to bring the world to an end.