Donald Trump floated the idea of getting "an extension for the presidency" this week in front of a crowd of his revelers in Elkhart, IN.
It's not the first time Trump has contemplated dictatorship. In March, he admired the maneuvering of Chinese President Xi Jinping in becoming "President for life," musing, "Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
The gut reaction of most Americans to the thought of anyone establishing that type of singular autocratic rule over our country is to think, No way—not in the United States. But this week revealed some of the starkest signs yet that the conditions for just such an eventuality are already taking hold.
The revelation that several international corporations funneled several million dollars into a shell company set up by Michael Cohen—who had zero expertise in their industries and by at least one account did absolutely no work—ripped the mask off a pay-to-play scheme that resembles an autocracy like Russia's.
While we can’t say for certain yet whether these companies received a direct business benefit from the money they paid Cohen, it sure looks that way at first blush. Just this week, we watched the stocks of pharmaceutical companies jump after Donald Trump backed off a campaign promise to make prescription medications more affordable.
One Pharma giant that benefitted from the announcement was Novartis, which shelled out $1.2 million to Cohen even though company executives claim they only met with him one time.
But that's not the only place where evidence emerged that Trump himself is single-handedly picking winners and losers among the corporations of the world. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai announced the death of Net Neutrality would become official next month on June 11—a huge win for telecom behemoths like AT&T, which lavished $600,000 on Cohen. In fact, on MSNBC Friday the executive director of American Oversight, Austin Evers, revealed AT&T executives secured a private dinner in Barcelona with Pai—just one month after hiring Cohen. That’s some pretty sweet access.
AT&T, which specifically sought to influence the views of the administration on FCC matters, tax reform, and a possible merger with Time Warner didn't get everything it wanted. Although the corporate tax cut passed by Republicans couldn't have been sweeter, Trump's Justice Department ultimately opposed the $85 billion AT&T/Time Warner merger. Even that, however, has a very Trumpian explanation—he loathes the critical coverage of CNN, which is owned by Time Warner. And in another major gaffe, Rudy Giuliani on Friday directly implicated Trump in the Justice Department’s decision to oppose the merger.
“The president denied the merger,” he said. “They didn’t get the result they wanted.” (That revelation could/should hurt the government’s case.)
But CNN wasn’t the only Trump-despised news outlet that dealt a blow to a major corporation. Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos also owns the "Amazon Washington Post," as Trump calls it, wound up on the losing end of another federal regulatory decision. Trump loves to hate the Post, Amazon, and Bezos alike and his administration basically sucker punched Amazon this week in an area where it's been an industry pioneer—drones.
When Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced Wednesday the FAA would work with certain private-sector organizations to integrate drones into their operations, Uber, FedEx, GE, Intel, and Alphabet were among the companies that got the nod.
One name was noticeably absent from the list of approved companies: Amazon. [...] Amazon’s rejection is ironic because it was one of the earliest supporters of the pilot program when it was announced in October.
Ironic, perhaps, but not surprising if you take a look at the stream of ire Trump spews against Amazon and Bezos in his twitter feed.
By now, we have all become accustomed to Trump’s juvenile jabs on twitter and elsewhere—he has been alternately blessing or lobbing grenades at the companies of his choosing since the day he was elected to office. But putting Cohen’s racket alongside Trump’s petty-yet-powerful corporate favoritism is filling out a picture that’s more than just seedy—it's systemic corruption. And that's got the makings of an autocracy like Vladimir Putin's, explained Ian Bassin of Protect Democracy in an illuminating interview Thursday on MSNBC's All In.
While Washington has always been host to venal corruption, where people sell access to line their pockets, Bassin explained, the combination of Cohen's brazen pay-to-play scheme coupled with Trump's regulatory interventions are a slippery slope to a self-reinforcing cycle.
"What we're looking at here is something that looks a little more like systemic corruption where the president is publicly saying he's going to potentially intervene in regulatory matters that DOJ is undertaking or other agencies are undertaking—sending signals that he might change the regulatory landscape for companies like Amazon, that he doesn't like, cost them a fortune. When you're a CEO and you see that the president can knock $55 billion off Amazon's market cap with a single tweet, your thought is, I gotta pay somebody here to keep them off my back.
Once that happens you really get into a situation that looks a lot more like how Vladimir Putin runs Russia, or Mubarak and Sisi run Egypt, which is what we've been calling at Protect Democracy, autocratic capture—where you essentially need to pay the autocrat in order to survive in the regulatory state. And when that happens, democracy itself is in danger."
This dynamic sets up a bribery/extortion loop where the money that flows to the autocrat from the industry titans, then flows back to the industry titans. Being a successful business person eventually becomes one in the same with being a supporter of the regime.
"The danger," Bassin said, "is that when elections come around, the powerful industry titans keep the regime in power because they know where their bread is buttered—they're getting an advantage in the regulatory marketplace over others and they want to keep that advantage."
What Bassin is describing is exactly why the Russian oligarchs don't have any interest in toppling Putin, who was just sworn into his fourth term as president this week.
In a normal analysis piece, I would end here after following one example to completion. But I feel personally compelled to elevate another way the Trump administration is modeling autocratic regimes because it is so horrific. Trump and his lieutenants have now officially adopted the policy of separating children from parents who cross the U.S. border seeking asylum.
In a New Yorker piece this week, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen explained how the practice of breaking up families is an age-old totalitarian tactic.
"Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror,” Gessen wrote, “Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror.”
Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. [...]
A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said.
In fact, one of the reasons Trump reportedly unloaded on his Homeland Security chief this week was because he thought she was resisting his order to separate children from their parents.
The president and his aides in the White House had been pushing a family separation policy for weeks as a way of deterring families from trying to cross the border illegally.
In other words, they're terrorizing these families for their own political benefit under the guise of enforcing immigration law.
If you find it impossible to imagine a scenario where Trump could engineer an “extension” of his presidency, look around—the seeds of autocratic rule have not only been planted by Trump and his coterie, they are already taking hold right before our eyes. We can only hope they are successfully stamped out by the law enforcement officials who Republican lawmakers are in the process of intentionally trying to cripple.
Here’s a clip of Protect Democracy’s Ian Bassin: