Imitation, the wits tell us, is the sincerest form of flattery – when the imitation is sincere. When Democrats repeat in reverse the policies and political rhetoric of President Donald Trump, they come not to flatter Trump, but to bury him.
Perhaps the most important question for Democrats right now
is: Why has their unabating anti-Trump rhetoric failed so miserably to dethrone
Trump in the public’s estimation? We know all the anti-Trump chatter – and the
many impeachments, and the many suits, three attempted assassinations and the
usual anti-Trump sour-pudding one finds in many of the Associated Press reports
-- has not in the least dented Trump’s own estimation of himself. Most people put this down to his
self-celebratory egomania, an offshoot of what they suppose is his tendency
towards authoritarianism or Caesarism.
Given the 250-year-old republican constitutional order that
American Democratic Socialists (ADS) hope to repeal, Caesarism, as it is
currently practiced in most socialist/communist countries, does not appear to
be a realistic possibility in the United States. Trump will no longer be
president after his term ends at high noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20,
2029, and continuity in office is an essential element in tyrannical
governance. The Castro brothers have ruled Cuba since 1959, more than six
decades of dictatorial rule. Venezuela has been overmastered by a mix of
military strongmen, democratic leaders, and Bolivarian socialist presidents
from José Antonio Páez in 1830 to Nicolás Maduro, now biding his time in
federal pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in
Brooklyn, New York, thanks to Trump.
At present, no U.S. Gulag has yet been established in New
York City to house Trump’s political opponents, and socialist Mayor Zohran
Mamdani has showed no interest in springing fellow socialist Maduro.
According to generally reliable Nielsen data, the legacy
media – major networks and cable both – has taken a deep dive. As of March
2025, legacy broadcasters accounted for just over 10% of total TV viewership.
Gallup data shows trust in national news outlets dropping to 40% among
Republicans, down from 70% in 2016. According to the New York Times, Trump’s
approval rating is hovering around 38% nationally. Alas, the public’s trust in
legacy media reporting is hovering around 34%. Trump, whatever his failings, is
still more popular than the “Grey Lady” New York Times, the ADS, or brussel sprouts.
Trump has been misbehaving for years. Political naughtiness
appears to be a permanent part of his public persona. Some commentators have
compared him to Huey Long, the infamous and vastly underestimated Louisiana
rabble-rouser. The political rabble in New Orleans, considerably less pristine
than the political rabble elsewhere in the nation, took to politics the way it
took to jazz, warmly embracing a politics that, like jazz, played between the
notes. Long was assassinated in the beautiful art deco building he had
constructed to keep incumbent Democrat politicians caged in a single Baton
Rouge building away from the usual temptations in New Orleans.
Trump, full of intimations, has occasionally suggested that
comparisons with former president Teddy Roosevelt (TR) might be appropriate.
Mark Twain, who could zing with the
best of them, was not a Roosevelt fan, or a fan of the U.S. Congress, or a fan
of political parties, or fan of a crippling post-Civil War Jim Crow
mindset. Consider the following
dictation note taken from the Autobiography
of Mark Twain: “Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party
allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish
purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the
while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty,
independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of
the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and
the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were
closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane
defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking
the shoes of his Southern master.”
Twain, everyman’s robust social commentator, heartily
disliked TR and skewered him at every opportunity. When TR, following his
failed independent run for the presidency on the Bull Moose Progressive ticket,
traveled to Africa to shoot water buffalo and other mountable wild animals,
Twain announced that TR had gone to
Africa “to shoot cows.” TR said if he found himself alone with Twain, he would
hang him.
Americans generally tolerate the rough and tumble of
politics. In present day America, the voting public has, so to speak, “come of
age.” They have left behind their innocent pre-teens years ages ago. The first
real American political campaign, the 1800 campaign featuring Thomas Jefferson
and John Adams, was not a Sunday stroll through the rose garden. Abe Lincoln
was routinely ridiculed by the media that supported his opponent, picturing him
occasionally in political cartoons as a black ape.
In Trump’s case, reactionary Democrats may have helped in
Trump’s presidential election against all three of Trump’s Democrat
presidential opponents: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the hapless Kamala
Harris.
If a resurrected Twain were writing about politics today, he
likely would denounce Democrat Party flimflammery and cowardice. A gilded
member of the Gilded Age – named after Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today -- Twain knew how America’s free
market system worked in practice. Corporations have never been taxpayers; they
were always tax collectors. Every progressive tax levied on every business is
collected by the business in the form of higher prices on provided goods and
services and passed on to federal and state governments – thereby increasing
the cost of goods and services. In what way, a resurrected Twain might ask,
does this convoluted process reduce a now burdensome
affordability crisis centered on the high prices of necessary goods and
services?
Absent a Gulag for capitalists in Mamdani’s New York City –
perhaps on Wall Street? – we will be stuck with
energized anarchic American
Democratic Socialists and
high prices.
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