Copyright Newsweek
Don’t ignore the fallout from the recent local elections. The results are important, but the reaction may be even more important. President Donald Trump is trotting out his election lies again. Be worried. It’s just a rehearsal. With Trump seemingly on the ballot in state and local elections, his adherents took a thumping. In a democracy it’s OK to be disappointed or even angry when your opponents win. But it’s not OK in a democracy to praise election results when you win but call them a fraud when you lose. And that’s just what Trump did after the recent results. About the vote in California to redraw congressional district lines in response to a similar move by Texas, he said: “The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED.” White House communications director Karoline Leavitt doubled down with debunked claims, saying, “It’s absolutely true that there is fraud in California elections.” Is it all just talk? What’s to worry about? Before you dismiss it, consider what it meant in the past and could mean in the future. Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election claiming “fraud,” and when that didn’t work, he tried to overthrow it with violence. Remember, Trump filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the election results, and despite him saying otherwise, his claims were fully heard and rejected by dozens of courts. Remember what you were thinking on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, not what Trump has tried to spin about it since. The election lies and even the mob are part of the same disturbing plan. It all comes out of a standard playbook about how to create an autocracy. It was chillingly foretold in a 2012 lecture at Dartmouth University by a conservative-leaning professor now teaching at Stanford named Stephen Kotkin. It was called, “The Six Rules Every Dictator Lives By.” Remember, the lecture was years before Trump entered politics. But here is Kotkin’s outline and how Trump appears to be carrying it out. Kotkin’s first rule is that you need to hire and train reliable instruments of oppression and violence. In other words, you need a group of masked government agents gaining experience in dragging people off the streets and causing them to disappear. Watch how Trump is training ICE for this mission and how he is training the military to get used to working in America’s streets. Once they have the experience, all they need are new missions about “election fraudsters” or “insurrectionists.” The second rule is to gather huge amounts of money to bully your enemies with and feed corruption. Studies in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal show he has amassed a war chest of billions. The third rule is to raise the cost of opposition. You do this by criminally prosecuting your opponents or intimidating them with violence. So far, Trump has indicted his former national security advisor John Bolton, former FBI Director James Comey and his nemesis in New York, state Attorney General Letitia James. Notice how he pardoned the January 6 rioters? How much he loves large rallies? It means Trump can summon a mob. The fourth rule is to manipulate life opportunities. You manipulate the ways people can move up the ladder of life—things like college and military promotions. Look how ruthlessly Trump has sought to control our most powerful universities and how many top military officers he has replaced. The fifth rule is to manipulate the media. So far Trump has bullied and extorted millions from Elon Musk’s X, ABC, CBS, Amazon, Facebook and YouTube. The sixth rule is to have an enemy to fear. It particularly helps if it comes from outside the country but is also present inside the country. Witness Trump’s demonization of migrants as murders, rapists and narco-traffickers whom we can all fear and hate together. It’s uncanny. It’s unnerving. And only the American people can stop Trump from using these six tools to gain enough power to ignore the next election results he doesn’t like. Perhaps it will be the 2026 congressional elections he will say are illegitimate. Perhaps the 2028 presidential election. If he can continue accumulating power from the dictator’s rulebook, we can be sure it will be both. Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
