Under Trump, democracy is quickly becoming no more than what the Roman Senate was under the emperors of Rome—a long powerless anachronism from the distant past.

According to yet another poll quoted by CNN, while Joe Biden holds a lead nationally over Donald Trump, he is like Hillary Clinton now behind in “battleground” states. We can see in states like Michigan those who are frustrated over lockdown or stay-at-home orders are tilting toward Trump, because they mistakenly blame Democrats for the COVID-19 issue. Yet even if Trump can’t be blamed for the appearance of the virus in this country, or some people choose to “forget” that he helped create the scale of the problem with his refusal to take it seriously over a critical six-week period, Trump’s actions and words still show that he severely lacks leadership qualities in times of national peril. “Leadership” is also something in short supply among Republican governors such as in Texas, where the reopening of the state has led to spikes in the number of virus cases and deaths, that the state attorney general is threatening counties and cities who wish to extend stay-at-home orders. The right-leaning Wisconsin State Supreme Court has also shown that at least in the case of its Democratic governor, his powers in the matter has severe limits. 

Trump attacking or blaming real and perceived “enemies” obviously works for some people, but people outside the Fox News bubble must not make the mistake of believing that Trump’s inability to foresee the economic as well social disarray his non-actions have caused are “fixable’ by Trump, his “advisors” and congressional supporters; their interests are solely partisan politics and looking after their own survival, like Prince Prospero and his rich friends in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Yes, everyone is frustrated by the fact that libraries and restaurants are closed, that there are no sporting events or movies to attend, and of course many millions of people are out-of-work. Voters are going to have to decide whether if a Democrat was in the White House that this pandemic would have been handled differently, and for the better. I think the answer to that question is an obvious yes.

But that answer is not obvious to people like Kevin Bain, a former administrative manager for the Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas. Bain posted on social media the following after he was told to show a test result if he refused to wear a face mask:

Any business that tells me to put on a mask (Whole Foods on Lomo Alto) in Dallas will get told to kiss my Corona ass and will lose my business forever. It’s time to stop this BULLSHIT. Do I have to show the lame security guard outside of a ghetto store my CV19 test result? I will show him my Glock 21 shooting range results. With Hornady hollow points. Pricey ammo, but worth it in this situation. They have reached the limit. I have more power than they do … they just don’t know it yet.

Bain is kind of person we are dealing with when you see all those throngs protesting stay-at-home orders in front of state capitol buildings, some even carrying weapons inside. And it isn’t just “regular” people who are defying the law, but you hear about county sheriffs defying Democratic governors and refusing to enforce their decrees. It can be claimed that most Trump supporters do not condone lawbreaking or shooting people who get in the way of their “freedom,” but then again most Germans claimed to not “personally” condone the excesses of their Nazi rulers. And with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Justice Department moving to shield Trump from being accountable for financial crimes he committed in the decades even before he was elected president, Trump is well on his way to becoming an autocratic, tin-pot dictator—and he may well be a de facto one now.

Trump has certainly talked-the-talk. He has declared “national emergencies” from national emergencies of his own creation to sidestep Congress. We have heard him many times claim that his power is absolute, without taking personal responsibility when the use of this perceived power causes ill. “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I'll use that power, we'll see.” And when he doesn’t use it to avert a national crisis, or misuses it, "No, I don't take responsibility at all.” Trump has repeatedly claimed immunity from the consequences of his misdeeds, and has repeatedly boasted of his power—especially when advised by familiars like Stephen Miller. During a discussion about keeping out immigrants from certain Middle Eastern countries, Miller exclaimed that “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned”; the tone he enunciated this in was just as frightening as the words themselves. Factcheck had one its more questionable “checks” claiming that Miller’s comments were cherry-picked and taken “out-of-context.” But no one should be fooled: Miller was claiming that racists like him and Trump had the absolute authority to skirt anti-discrimination laws to “protect” the country from an “infestation” of people from “shithole” countries. What Factcheck didn’t understand was that once people accepted this argument, worse was to come. 

In 1887, Lord Acton famously stated in a letter to scholar Mandell Creighton that 

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position like Ravaillac, but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III of England ordered his Scots minister to exterminate a clan. Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes; you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.

Acton points out here that if the law of the time does not make the corrupt accountable for their crimes, then history must pass that judgment. When Acton talks about “great” men, he is not talking about on a moral or ethical level, but those who have achieved absolute power accountable to no one, and thus they are in fact “bad” men. He asserts that it is a “heresy” to claim that corrupt bad men like Trump are “sanctified” merely for the office they hold. Acton famously argues against the notion that “the ends justify the means,” and notes the mendacity of punishing low-level flunkies who merely carry out orders, while the true villains not only escape punishment, but are often “cleansed” by favorable memory. 

Trump is a particularly dangerous man because he had everything given to him since he was a child, and he often still behaves as a spoiled child who expects everyone to meet his needs, no matter how illegal or corrupt. He has lived in a fantasy world where his lack of business acumen has been masked by equally corrupt lawyers and accountants who insured that others paid for his mistakes. Trump's bloated megalomania is such that he feels great distaste for compromise with “less great” partners on anything like equal terms. It was his racist propaganda sloganeering that got him elected president, feeding on the fears and paranoia of white nationalism and grievance, not on his qualifications for the job. Over the past three-plus years Trump has become even more convinced that as president he is untouchable, and Republicans have simply shrugged off his power grabbing even from them. Trump’s lust for power without accountability will only increase if he is reelected, and he will only be further convinced with the help of craven Republican lawmakers and right-wing media that his power has no boundaries—and even when he encounters them, he will simply ignore them and do as he wishes anyways, whether in secret and boasting of it publically.  

Under Trump, democracy is quickly becoming no more than what the Roman Senate was under the emperors of Rome—a long powerless anachronism from the distant past.