Treating Trump's Abuse of Power as a Spectator Sport
What is a "win" or a "victory"? Those words can only meaningfully describe having prevailed in a contest that could have gone the other way. For example, even though 50.2 percent of counted votes were cast against Donald Trump in 2024, he did eke out a plurality of the popular vote, with his total being 1.48 percent higher than Kamala Harris's (and thus the sixth smallest plurality in US history). But that outcome is correctly described as a win or a victory, because it was very much not in the bag in advance, and it even seemed likely that Trump would repeat his 2016 performance and become President again only via the Electoral College -- or perhaps through a successful coup this time around.
As I noted in my column earlier this week, however, it is infuriatingly obtuse (bordering on insane) to describe what has been happening in the last six months in the way that The New York Times recently did: as Trump "tall[ying] wins." No, he is in fact getting his way because he is abusing power and benefiting from the climate of fear that he and his supporters have created, with judges and members of Congress (and even city councilors and school board members) receiving death threats to prevent them from crossing the cult leader. It is hardly language pedantry to say that throttling one's opponents through threats of political retribution and actual violence is quite different from "tallying wins."
In that column, I extended the familiar internet meme about the Leopards-Eating-People's-Faces Party, noting that the meme was originally created in a world in which we assumed that people would ultimately be upset when they themselves became the ones whose faces were being eaten: Wait, it can happen to ME?! As I put it on Tuesday, however, "what we are now seeing involves people insisting either that their faces are not being eaten or that face-eating is an interesting phenomenon that we can all find fascinating and discuss objectively."
I acknowledged there that it can be iffy to extend a metaphor, but I will risk it again by saying that it is worse still than what I wrote only three days ago. It is not merely something that commentators are finding fascinating and wanting to discuss; it is affirmatively a source of excited wonder and admiration. "Look at how many faces that leopard has eaten! Boy, he's really good at it, isn't he? It must be great to be that leopard right now. He certainly looked pleased when he took a bite out of my face the other day."
Could it be even worse than that? As I also noted, people like Jon Stewart are saying that non-Trumpists need to show "discernment" and not call fascism fascism lest we need to call out some other fascist outrages in the future. Translated: "Shut up about that leopard eating a few -- OK, a lot of -- faces. He hasn't eaten every face, and what will we say when he eats more of them?"
The day after I wrote that column, however, even The Guardian chimed in with this: "US Senate passes aid and public broadcasting cuts in victory for Trump." Oy. Again, this is not merely a matter of choosing le mot juste, because it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy. The would-be king is not getting his way by abusing power, you see. He is doing so by defensible means, winning when he could have lost! And that causes people to attack those who have just been steamrolled for being weak (or something), even though there was no way that Trump's detractors could have stopped the terrible outcome from occurring.
But even as we deplore the sanewashing and the paralyzing effect that it has on the opposition, we should also talk about what those "wins" say about the current situation. In particular, that piece in The Guardian was a report about the US Senate's passage of what is technically called a rescissions bill. Specifically, Republicans in Congress voted to approve Trump's demand that they cancel spending that had already been appropriated by law. In this case, they "rescind[ed] $9 billion in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) — a move that cuts all federal support for NPR, PBS and their member stations — and about $7 billion in foreign aid."
What does all of that mean, other than that the press now gets to talk about another face-eating as if it were a professional wrestling match? It turns out that the rescission procedure was originally created as a reaction against Richard Nixon's unconstitutional "impoundment" of funds. Nixon had said that he would simply refuse to spend the funds that Congress had by law (laws that Nixon and other presidents had themselves signed) ordered the President to disburse. Before the Supreme Court had a chance to affirm a lower court ruling that found Nixon's refusal unconstitutional, however, the Watergate-era Congress set up a procedure to make rescissions possible but highly unlikely. Under the rule that they created, a President can announce that he is impounding funds, but if Congress does not expressly approve the rescission, the funds must be disbursed.
So what happened here? Republicans passed bills that appropriated funds, Trump said "don't wanna," and Republicans said, "Yes sir." And any remaining notion that there is a meaningful separation of powers in the United States is now not merely dead but really most sincerely dead. A New York Times headline says it all: "Republicans Fretted Over Ceding Spending Power to Trump. Then They Voted to Do It: In voting for President Trump’s cancellation of $9 billion in spending they had already approved, Republicans in Congress showed they were willing to cede their power of the purse."
With the Supreme Court's Republican-engineered super-majority letting Trump create realities on the ground even as challenges to his actions remain technically alive, judicial checks are dead. And with Trump having fired inspectors general (a move that our old friend and concern troll Jon Stewart refused to condemn while instead mocking Rachel Maddow for correctly calling it "textbook authoritarian takeover 101"), internal checks on the presidency have also been interred.
All of which means that those who have long tried to calm nerves by referring to "the strength of US institutions" are now even more out to lunch. What institutions have not been fully compromised at this point?
As a very small point of faint optimism, I will note that the Courts and Republicans in Congress could rediscover their independence at any time, if they choose to do so. Why would they choose? If the person around which their cult of personality formed were gone, it is difficult (though not impossible) to imagine all of those people suddenly saying that "President Vance must not be questioned," if for no other reason than that they will be at each other's throats. Until and unless that day comes, however, the rescission vote was the moment at which any lingering notion that the United States in 2025 is not a dictatorship finally became fully impossible to defend with a straight face.
Can it be even worse than all that? Of course it can. In the first of my two columns last week decrying the cruelty of the Republican's recent budget bill, I called out Democrats and others for focusing on the "$3.3 trillion of additional debt" that will be one result of that bill. I noted in particular that complaining about the debt empowers those who are looking for further excuses to slash needed spending. And here we are, listening to Republicans crow about having saved a fraction of a percent of the budget by attacking two of their favorite targets.
I added: "And it is not as if the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress will not have many more opportunities to cut more programs and cause more pain." At that moment, I was not even thinking about the possibility of within-fiscal-year rescissions, which have been all but unprecedented in the last fifty years (as if precedent matters at this point). At a minimum, Republicans can use their majorities in both houses of Congress to make every budget bill more painful for the non-rich, more cold-blooded, more merciless. At best, they only need to wait for any particular budgeting period to end. With their capitulation on rescissions, however, the last procedural roadblock to having Trump simply cancel disfavored spending on a whim has been demolished.
Dictators do not choose to do everything that they could do, but they succeed in doing everything that they choose to do. But hey, Trump is still tallying wins, and everyone who describes him accurately is being uncouth or non-discerning. Even readers who think I overused the leopard metaphor earlier must still see that the media is not treating this as a moment to recoil in horror but is instead describing Trump's abuse of power as if it were a spectator sport.
- Neil H. Buchanan