“You’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
When he said that to a bleach-eyed coven of idol worshippers assembled by Turning Point USA, Donald Trump played the room.
To those outside the room, Trump’s statement likely means one of two things:
1) An increasingly harried, losing-it 78-year-old who faces a raft of criminal charges has lost it at last.
2) His faculties are intact, so trust him. He will end self-government if given the chance. He’ll be the government for life.
I’m going to suggest a third option. If voters award him the presidency again, his aging mind and body won’t matter.
To do what his followers desire, Trump needs no brainwaves. You saw him manage the pandemic. That’s how you do it brain-dead.
An absence of cranial activity doesn’t mean his second term can’t work – at least per the Heritage Foundation’s designs.
In Woody Allen’s 1973 futuristic comedy “Sleeper,” a president’s age and infirmity have reduced him physically to no more than two working nostrils. He is kept “alive” — at least his nose is — by electrodes.
This is pertinent in 2024, because to meet their ends, all the anti-democracy forces need is Trump’s tissue.
After all, what does, “You don’t have to vote again” sound like to you?
They could dispense with the nose bone entirely. One working ear lobe would do. One good ear to govern us forever.
Key checks prevented this in the last iteration of President Trump. He had to leave. Congress and the courts wouldn’t cooperate with his designs to stay in office regardless of what the voters wanted.
Most pertinently, his vice president at the time wouldn’t cooperate, though Trump lied that Mike Pence supported his coup. In truth, Trump called Pence denigrating names for not agreeing to follow.
Ah, but along comes new Trump running mate J.D. Vance. He’s all in on a coup if necessary.
Consider it a job requirement in a post-Constitution government.
Vance says that if he were vice president in 2020 he would have carried out Trump’s scheme with a snap of his heels. He would have ignored any court order that overruled such an action.
One of his favorite lines is from Andrew Jackson, who in 1832 ignored a Supreme Court ruling that the federal government observe Native Americans’ legal rights to land ownership, something that states and white supremacists fought with vigor.
“(Chief Justice) John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” said Jackson.
Writes Zack Beauchamp in Vox, Vance “believes that the government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian, steps are justified.”
Similarly, Vance mouths the sentiment of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, with its radical designs to make the Justice Department and FBI partisan cudgels rather than independent agencies, and to target the IRS with destructive designs.
Vance embraces the Project 2025 proposal to clear-cut the ranks of civil servants in favor of those who swear loyalty to Trump, or whatever tissue of him remains far into the post-democracy future.
Time to get serious here. In “Sleeper,” Woody Allen has fun with a future beyond our reckoning. We don’t need a screenwriter with tongue in cheek to imagine exactly what can happen if a somnolent and poorly informed populace allows a dangerous demagogue who doesn’t respect the law — civil, criminal, constitutional — to have such power.
It happened in 2016 when the candidate with fewer popular votes wheedled his way into the White House. We must not give him the opportunity to never leave.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.