100 Days In: Why The Authoritarian Argument Against Trump Doesn't Work

There isn't really a good argument against Donald Trump. Except this one.

The once and future Donald

The victory of the Liberals in Canada makes me think that Donald Trump may be the best thing to happen for America’s alliances. Add to that the recent Ukraine renewables deal and we get a lot closer to a better understanding of the new world order as imagined by the Mad Orange King.

Prime Ministers Mark Carney and Keir Starmer: Do we forget that Canada belonged to the UK until 1982?

The conventional narrative is that Donald Trump wanted Pierre Poilievre to take over Canada but I’m not so sure that’s correct. Why would The Donald and his Saudi allies want a drill, baby, drill premier of Canada when oil is at $55 a barrel and expected to fall further still?

In some sense Trump wants Canadians rallying together and having a renewed sense of nationalism even if it’s against him.

A stronger Canada is a Canada spending more on defense and internal security — something absolutely essential with all the Chinese and Indian malefactors running around whacking dissidents.

Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t Justin Trudeau either. Carney isn’t a failson ski instructor but a scholarship boy, born in the Northwest Territories. He played hockey, of course, before working for the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. Canada’s meritocracy is on the march and that’s good for America.

Like his Mexican counterpart Claudia Sheinbaum, who is a nuclear physicist, Carney’s a serious person with a serious resume. I myself met him many years ago at an event — where else? — at Harvard University, which along with Oxford University, is Carney’s alma mater.

We won’t hold Harvard or Oxford against him — though maybe we should as I’ll note in a moment — but you can see how the hockey playing technocrat appealed to Canadian sense of fair play as against the career politician Pollievre who has seemingly had no job since college other than being a professional nuisance.

If you turn to Australia — that other 51st state! — you’ll see a similar process taking place. Peter Dutton was expected to cruise to victory but now Trump’s recent perceived craziness has made Prime Minister Anthony Albanese victory altogether likely. In effect, that’ll mean we have a centre-left government in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Interestingly, all three of these governments have maintained the Washington consensus against China — at least officially.

No, I haven’t gone all neocon on you. We don’t need to prepare for a war with China. That’s both inane and insane. After all, China’s economy is cratering, its population is collapsing, its elites beg to stay in our countries because they like drinking water from our tap and breathing our clean air, and its cars are cheap enough to sustain an affordable transition to cleaner air in the developing world. Those monsters!

Left unsaid is whether or not China actually likes the tariffs it is officially condemning because it wants to build a domestic industry that expands its reach globally. China doesn’t really consume, at least nowhere near as much as Americans do, and it may be beneficially for both countries for us to interact with one another through Southeast Asian intermediaries.

Israel’s ambassador to America and Barack Obama’s handler Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, meanwhile, says the tariffs are bad, bad, bad. Maybe that’s as close to a ringing endorsement as we’re going to get. When Beijing landed a plane for relief in Lebanon Chisrael died with a thunderclap.

Forgive me if I think that, well, maybe The Donald is good at this.

When you compare Donald Trump to an authoritarian you’re, in effect, insulting real authoritarians. Trump is nowhere near as organized as some of his counterparts. Nor is America anywhere near as centralized as Beijing or Moscow. Our financial capital and our political capital are still distinct cities — something Calvin Coolidge once noted led to a strengthening American excellence. Whether this lack of centralization can endure or not, I don’t know. It does seem to me as if the Imperial City is going to continue growing apace, notwithstanding all DOGEing to the contrary.

You can’t claim someone is ending democracy when they are popularly elected. What that means is that you think so poorly of your neighbors and fellow Americans that you’re really the anti-democratic force.

The case against Trump isn’t so much about his authoritarian bent but about the enshittification of government services which DOGE and the Tech Right has brought about. But here, too, the Donald escapes blame. He isn’t a former venture capitalist, like his running mate.

You really do have to wonder: Are liberals really going to go out there and defend suspected MS-13 gang members or anti-American meritocracy Harvard?

OK, I guess. But forgive me if I am not exactly thrilled to support such an agenda. It’s actually good to have tension between academia and the U.S. government. The government should be asking what we get for all the money we spend on higher education. Harvard should be asking how it allowed itself to be so compromised by Chinese princelings and Israeli spies. If globalization is the movement of goods, people and information then it stands to reason that the most globalized university — Harvard — would find itself under review during a more nationalistic period.

Ezra Klein, who went to UCLA, is right to point out that Red States are doing a better job of being liveable and affordable but he’s as much to blame for that increase in pricing with his strange alliance with the tech community.

No, we don’t need to be building more housing in the increasingly desertifying parts of the climate-changed American West but we do need to be asking why AirBNB is allowed to buy off former White House chiefs of staff like Ron Klain or to have its billionaires participate in DOGE. Viewed with hindsight, AirBNB looks like a way in which mobsters and tech oligarchs can drive up middle class housing.

Alas, this question of corruption within both parties is something that’s been missing from a real progressive reform.

Our second largest city — Los Angeles, where Klein and I both lived — has a real water crisis, to say nothing of Phoenix, our sixth largest city. No amount of YIMBYism is going to change this underlying reality.

Yes, we should be building but we should be building where there’s water.

Let me cite Ezra Klein’s employer — The New York Times — about what we can expect in the future.

Ask yourself: Do you think fires are going to become more or less common as climate change happens? I think we’re likely to see more climate refugees within America.

A sensible Democratic Party would be working to think about where all those people should go and it would see that as the opportunity to relocate its voters to more red states. A friend of mine notes that the Democrats have done very well when they used wealth to demographically transform Red States into Blue ones.

Think Bill Clinton aligning with Sam Walton to flip Arkansas or JFK working alongside his father’s money to change Massachusetts.

As the fake government becomes more fake, the real government becomes more real.

Donald Trump may well be president but the Office of the President is a collection of people who are committed to making the country actually work.

No, this isn’t the Jared Kushner presidency and it’s time to start understanding that the traditional arguments against The Donald aren’t working.