One reading I’d like to touch on is Chapter One of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book, “How Democracies Die”. At first, I didn’t understand why the Aesop passage was included in the chapter: then I understood the more I read. It told the story of a horse, who gave up power to a hunter to get back at a stag. This horse never gets their power back, because the hunter has it under his reigns. When the authors connect this to Mussolini, and Hitler, the connection between the passage and the content becomes much clearer. Mussolini, an outsider, was initially welcomed into Italian politics. He improved the Italian economy after coming into power, and at first, it seemed everything was fine. But as time progressed, the world saw what a mistake it had been to let Mussolini into power. I see clear and chilling connections between this and how Trump came into power. 

In 2015, the Republican party was trying to decide who to endorse to run for president. Would it be Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio? Ben Carson? The previous election cycle that had run Mitt Romney. Romney, who identified himself as a moderate, was not nearly as far right as the party has turned out in today’s time. He was in favor of government-funded Medicare for senior citizens. He cited MLK as a role model. He didn’t support laws restricting access to abortion. In the 2016 election cycle, in the end, as everyone knows, the Republican Party picked Trump to be its candidate. The reasoning for this will always elude me: he was, and is, a completely unqualified outsider. At least Ted Cruz had political experience. Trump was a television star and business mogul, with a honestly shady business practice as well as a history of controversy after controversy.

Why did the Republican Party choose this outsider? I guess they knew what nobody could have guessed: that he would defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. In a well-known reading by Mayhew, he identifies politicians as “single-minded seekers of re-election”. The Republicans were only seeking to return to power: after 8 years of a Democrat in power, a Black one at that, they must have been desperate to turn the political pendulum back. In choosing Trump as their candidate, they fundamentally changed the nature of American politics. A man who attempted to overturn the results of a completely legitimate election has now returned to power. The foundation of our democracy is crumbling: in his first week back in office he signed an executive order that violated the constitution: he tried restricting birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The constitution guarantees citizenship to EVERYONE born on US soil: Section one says explicitly that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump has no respect for the rule of law of this country. The Republican party is now the horse from Aesop’s fable. It made the mistake of thinking he would play by the rules. Like Italy, the Republican Party let an outsider think everything would be fine. They have now trapped themselves in Trumpism. We are quickly and undeniably headed towards authoritarianism and oligarchy, all because the Republican party wanted to return to power in the easiest way possible: instead of actually appealing to American citizens, making politics into a spectacle.