Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor to The Next Move.
From the fire hose that is President Trump, you can only look at a few drops. I would like to look at a particular drop today.
Lately, Trump has been holding rallies, campaigning for Republican candidates. He has always been sensitive to his crowd size. And a report in The New York Times noted that there had been empty seats.
So what if there were empty seats? These arenas are big. But Trump blew a gasket, tweeting, “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”
Should be arrested. Don’t gloss over that. Don’t shrug and say, “That’s just Trump being Trump.” This is significant.
Every president has complained about the press, as Wednesday follows Tuesday. But how many have said—repeatedly—that reporters ought to be arrested? Trump’s instincts are authoritarian. This is obvious to some of us but not to others. Or maybe it is obvious to them, too, but too awkward to admit?
Ever since he arrived on the scene, Trump has made clear that he admires dictators, and probably envies them. I have written about this ad nauseam—here, for example. Trump reserves special warmth, and special praise, for a big three: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un.
A Republican president, adored by the “conservative movement,” enamored of communist dictators? This is a crazy age.
In a 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump said that Putin was “top of the line.” So were Xi and Kim, he said. “They’re all top of the line.”
About the Chinese dictator—who is presiding over the most oppressive period in China since the Cultural Revolution—Trump said this: “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find—there’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.”
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Almost ten years ago now, Charles Krauthammer warned of the “authoritarian temptation,” increasingly evident on the American right. I will take a second to remind readers who Krauthammer was.
Born in 1950, Krauthammer was a political theorist, psychiatrist, and journalist. He was known as a “conservative” for most of his career, and that he was. He wanted to conserve the liberal tradition embodied in the American founding.
When he was in college, trying to figure out the world, he came across Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty. “A great fog lifted,” he later wrote. “I was forever enlisted on the side of limited, constitutional government—flawed as it was and despised at the time as ‘the system.’”
In the summer of 2017, Krauthammer sat down to write “The Authoritarian Temptation” (published in this volume). It was the last extended essay he ever wrote. He adapted his title from the 1976 book by Jean-François Revel, the French philosopher and journalist: The Totalitarian Temptation.
“In what would have been unimaginable 25 years ago,” wrote Krauthammer, “mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethno-nationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction, and an attraction—still only an attraction, not yet a commitment—to strongman rule.”
That attraction would become more like a commitment in due course.
The “most conspicuous symptom” of the trend, wrote Krauthammer, “is a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias. Remarkably, this tendency is most pronounced on the right. The reversal is head-snapping.”
It was definitely head-snapping in 2017, when Krauthammer was writing. It has for years been the “new normal” (not so new).
“Today,” Krauthammer continued, “some on the right have begun to profess a certain admiration of and attraction to Putinism and his brand of Russian authoritarianism.” The writer found this “jarring,” which is akin to “head-snapping.”
“After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia,” he wrote, “it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway?”
Krauthammer listed some of Putin’s crimes, including the murder of political opponents and journalists. He also quoted President Trump, who, challenged on Putin as killer, said, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Wrote Krauthammer, “Moral equivalence so shocking, emanating from the elected leader of the United States, is not to be ignored.” Correct. But isn’t it ignored, or at least soft-pedaled, routinely?
Charles (we were friends) died in 2018. He was a hero on the right, a near-nightly commentator on Fox News. If he had lived longer into the Trump era, what would his status have been? Would he have “kept up with the times,” “gotten with the program”? Hopped aboard “the Trump train,” as so many did?
I doubt it.
Interviewed in 2013, Charles said, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think—and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” In an email to me, he said, “I must admit that when I write these days I have the feeling that everything I say is so perfectly obvious that there’s no need to write it. Except that these days, that’s all the more reason to write it.”
Yes. Many times in recent years, I have mentioned Charles and “The Authoritarian Temptation.” Why do I keep doing so? I think the following exchange will explain.
After a Krauthammer column—another one—on Israel and the Palestinians, I emailed, “Charles, I find that I can barely write about the Arab–Israeli conflict anymore, so weary am I from doing it, year after year, decade after decade. I’m glad you’re not weary—or that you push through it, to say the necessary, again.”
Charles replied: “I know exactly of your weariness. My reluctance to write about it once again is enormous. It’s only a sense of duty—and the shocking realization of how few are prepared to say the obvious truth anymore—that makes me do it.”
I know exactly what he means, always have.
Last week, Putin celebrated his birthday. Trump placed a phone call to him, to wish him a happy one. Two days later, Trump announced an oil deal with Putin, slamming the Ukrainians in the bargain.
Putin’s birthday in 2006 was a particularly happy one for him. On that day, he got the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, one of the bravest journalists in the world. I hope there are monuments to her in Russia someday. And I believe the United States should be on the side of the brave and the murdered.
More from The Next Move:
New Details: Assassins Were Indicted. Very Likely, I Was Their Target.
An update in Putin’s murder plot on American soil.
Charles Krauthammer made actual conservatives proud. He was the best. I miss his insight and wisdom.
I think we’re well beyond the “temptation” phase. We ought to be asking what is wrong with the conservative soul that it so easily has embraced authoritarianism. It’s almost as if this was always the plan, that it’s in the DNA. The conservative movement has a significant reckoning to undertake.