Emperor Trump's war on democracy

The California senator was one of many Democrats, human rights activists and notable figures that have condemned Trump’s latest move.

Trump’s executive order, part of an “extreme vetting” plan, stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and bars entry into the United States for 90 days those from seven predominantly Muslim countries - Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

“We don’t want them here,” said Trump during a signing ceremony at the Pentagon, while speaking of the Islamist terrorists the order is supposed to address.

Human rights activists roundly condemned Trump’s actions, describing them as officially sanctioned religious persecution dressed up to look like an effort to make the United States safer.

Legal experts too, pointed out that Trump’s order that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims, could be challenged as a violation of the US constitution, and international law.

These latest moves by Trump, part of some 14 presidential actions in his first week in office, have only added to fears that the newly elected leader is completely at odds with the fundamental democratic values of the country he now leads.

“He’s trying to silence and erase citizens who don’t support his message and policies by claiming he alone speaks for ‘real’ Americans and can tell us who qualifies as such,” said Bridgette Dunlap, Human Rights Fellow and professor of law.

Dunlap’s view echoes the concerns of many Americans who feel that “We the People,” or at least those who disagree with Trump’s views, are now his real targets.

Those worried about Trump insist that democracy requires competition among opposing ideas, and that there can’t be a debate if those in power like Trump refuse to acknowledge facts or dissenting viewpoints.

During his inauguration speech, Trump claimed repeatedly that he speaks for and will govern for “the people,” and referred to his oath of office as an “oath of allegiance to all Americans”.

But as Bridgette Dunlap and other legal experts have since highlighted, the oath that Trump took is not one of allegiance to “the people”, but an oath to uphold the US constitution.

“The people, disagree about lots of things; the document structures how the country navigates those disagreements, and restricts what those in the majority can do to those in the minority,” says Dunlap.

“But Trump has made it clear he plans to justify whatever he wants to do as the will of ‘the people’ while portraying anyone who disagrees with him as too crooked and corrupt to be among them.”

If constitutional issues lie at the heart of many Americans’ concerns, then a cursory look at the list of executive orders and other actions taken by the new president over his first week in office, gives some idea of the scale and scope of the changes Trump intends making.

Political observers say that Trump is moving much more quickly than his predecessors. His executive actions are unusually ambitious, and address a large number of major policy areas, from immigration to trade to national security

So far he has begun to take Obamacare apart and aims to restrict funds for global health assistance groups that provide abortion services. His administration has launched an attack on what it has called “sanctuary cities,” the more than 400 cities and counties in the US that offer some form of safe haven to America’s 11 million undocumented migrants.

Trump has also issued an order calling for the “immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” with Mexico for stricter enforcement of immigration laws and for speedier deportations.

Then there is the president’s belief expressed last week that “torture absolutely works,” and his indication that he will consider a return to the use of CIA “black sites,” to which prisoners are sent for harsh interrogation.

Other issues too lie at the heart of concerns over Trump’s assault on American democracy and constitutional rights. On Friday he lambasted the news media as the “opposition party,” echoing the words of his chief counsellor Stephen Bannon.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Bannon House told The New York Times, labelling the press corps the "opposition party."

Trump predictably wasted no time in backing up his White House adviser’s outspoken views.

“I think the media is the opposition party in many ways,” Trump said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network when asked about Bannon’s comment.

“I say they treat me so unfairly it’s hard to believe that I won,” Trump continued. “But the fortunate thing about me is I have a big voice. I have a voice that people understand. And you see it now.”

Trump’s big voice only adds fuel to a longstanding war his team has waged against the news media, with few signs the contentious relationship will change now that he is president.

According to The Hill, the Washington based political journalism newspaper and website, the similarity of their statements shows the degree to which Bannon and Trump are in sync. Bannon is said to have had a major role in drafting the flurry of executive orders the president has signed in the last week.

If Trump’s undermining of freedom of the press is one of the most obvious challenges to American democratic values, then so too is his insistence on investigating American voters.

Trump appears utterly preoccupied with losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes, claiming that between 3 million and 5 million ballots were illegally cast in the election.

In his first meeting last week with congressional leaders, he opened the discussion with wild claims of millions of these illegally cast votes.

According to The New York Times, Trump’s remarks centred on a story about “voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote.” These voters, the president speculated were from Latin American countries.

As ever Steve Bannon, now chief White House strategist, is never far from Trump’s position on such controversial issues. It was Bannon who once suggested reverting back to a system where the right to vote is reserved only for property owners. When it was brought to his attention that African Americans would be disproportionately affected by such a system, Bannon is said to have responded, “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

For months both during his campaign and since election as president, Trump has attacked the American election system with empty rhetoric. The idea that his administration can be trusted to investigate the 2016 election with any integrity is nonsense insist opponents.

They remain sceptical that any investigation led by a Trump administration that embraces “alternative facts” can be conducted in a fair and impartial manner. Trump’s attitude meanwhile speaks for itself.

“Of those votes cast, none of them come to me. … They would all be for the other side,” insisted Trump when speaking about the alleged fraudulent votes. Trump has insisted too that any investigation would focus on large urban areas where support for him was low during the election.

In a recent article on the website of the research and advocacy organisation, the Centre for American Progress, members railed against what they say is a witch hunt against his fellow Americans.

Rather than spending millions of tax-payers’ dollars on an investigation into fake claims of voter fraud they say, the Trump administration and fellow Republican officials would be better off focusing their attention on the real threats to the integrity of US elections.

“In a country where nearly 93 million eligible Americans did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, government officials should be investigating how to make the nation’s electoral process more inclusive, rather than searching for ways to place additional burdens on eligible Americans’ access to the polls,” writers Liz Kennedy and Danielle Root argued on the Centre’s behalf.

“Instead of engaging in a witch-hunt to persecute American voters, government officials should dedicate resources to conducting a major investigation into Russian meddling, which was actually found to target our elections,” the writers’ added in their article.

The subtext to the motive behind Trump’s claims of illegal voting is, say critics, becoming increasingly obvious. Quite simply he believes the millions of people who voted against him are either literally not American or un-American fraudsters.

“It has been said that voting “is the most valuable right a person possesses, because without it, all other rights are meaningless…Americans cannot allow Trump and his fellow Republican officials to close the doors of our democracy,” warned the Centre for American Progress.

Political observers say this all fits a pattern of him attempting to discredit or silence those he deems enemies, be it institutions or individuals.

“Trump targets individuals who question him as well. When a union leader corrected the record about the jobs at an Indiana factory Trump claimed to have saved, Trump used his megaphone to try to discredit and silence him,” says attorney and Human Rights Fellow Bridgette Dunlap.

“When women spoke out to allege that Trump did commit the kinds of sexual assaults he was caught on tape bragging about, he characterised them as lying political enemies and threatened to sue,” Dunlap added.

Away from the headline grabbing and emotive issue of voting rights however lies another area that many see as very telling in terms of Donald Trump’s undermining of American democratic values.

Though it caught little media attention outside the United States, reports surfaced that Trump will propose a federal budget that would entirely defund the country’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

As some observers have since pointed out this decision cannot simply be seen as fiscally motivated given that combined, both bodies constitute less than .01 percent of the US federal budget.

Instead, Trump’s declaration of war on the arts and humanities tells us much more about where he as an individual, politician and president are coming from ideologically.

Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the Pen American Centre that works to advance literature and defend free expression, says Trump’s assault on the arts must be “seen in the context of his repudiation of the American ideals - grounded in the Enlightenment - of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.”

Writing in the respected journal Foreign Policy last week, Nossel sees Trump’s proposals as an early effort to entrench within the machinery of the US government his elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.

“The Trump team has shown contempt for Enlightenment values shared by liberals and conservatives alike,” argues Nossel.

“Concepts like the search for truth, the open exchange of ideas, and the esteem for culture may read like empty platitudes etched in the walls of ivy-covered universities. But they are principles that undergird not just a liberal arts education but also the Common Core curriculum taught in hundreds of thousands of US public schools.”

Under Trump the decades-old culture war arguments take on a deeper and more sinister cast, Nosell says, reiterating that this is not man or leader who considers evidence that contradicts his views.

“For him, being called out, rebutted, and even ridiculed for purveying falsehoods is cause not for remorse or retraction but rather reinforcement of the lies and reproof of those who dare challenge them,” Nosell says.

During his election campaign many Americans and those outside the country believed that should Donald Trump’s succeed in taking office then much of his more divisive and intolerant views would be tempered.

Trump may only be a week into office but already the indications are he is not for turning and any shift of tack is unlikely to happen.

Almost daily Trump finds himself at odds with many of most cherished democratic values and ideals the US has sought to foster.

This remains a president, who is openly hostile to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. He remains a casual racist and sexist who rejects equality and practices prejudice regularly.

For many Americans he represents a dangerous attempt to delegitimise so much of what they hold dear. For others of course who voted for him, he is simply carrying out his election pledges.

The burning question now though is just what toll his presidency will take long term on American democracy?

“Populist dictators get away with extralegal and unconstitutional acts by claiming authorisation from ‘the people', human rights activist and US attorney Bridgette Dunlap warned her fellow Americans.

“The first step in that anti-democratic effort is to make sure people with inconvenient facts and contrary ideas are silenced, discredited or erased. That’s what Trump is doing now. Don’t stop paying attention.”