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Part 2 of Democracy Awakening deals with Donald Trump’s presidency, which Richardson argues represents a major change from prior administrations, even conservative ones. For decades, movement conservatism has argued that the federal government should be radically diminished or entirely abolished. Richardson maintains that those statements have been cynical efforts to attract voters, and that in reality, conservatives have not really wanted the government to be destroyed. The movement’s true desire, Richardson claims, has always been to end social spending and regulation so that wealthy business interests could have the kind of power they wielded before the New Deal. These business interests would not be served by destabilizing the government. She says that in Trump, conservatives saw a candidate who could excite the masses, but they failed to realize that he had his own agenda. Trump behaved like an authoritarian from the beginning, Richardson says, working to destroy the government by replacing competent civil service employees with often inexperienced loyalists. By empowering a charismatic, populist leader driven by self-interest and vengeance, Richardson says that Republicans lost their ability to control the policies of the executive branch. Richardson argues that Trump was a new and dangerous kind of president.

Richardson asserts that, from the beginning of his campaign, Trump and his advisors embraced foreign interference in the nation’s election and governance. Trump advisors Paul Manafort and Roger Stone had a long history of working with movement conservatives, including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and authoritarian leaders in other countries. Manafort owed millions of dollars to allies of Vladmir Putin, the dictatorial leader of Russia, and Richardson maintains that he sought to use his connections with Trump to settle the debt. She continues that Putin knew that a destabilized United States would strengthen Russia, so he aimed to help Trump’s election chances. According to Richardson, he ordered a robust social media campaign of disinformation and hacks on servers used by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Russian operatives and American Trump advisors flooded social media with inflammatory lies, Richardson says, claiming that Democrats and Hillary Clinton rejected American ideals and likening their support of marginalized groups to socialism. Soon, Trump supporters advanced slogans that were sympathetic to authoritarian regimes with ties to Stone and Manafort. Richardson says that Trump’s collusion with Russia created a political movement that allied itself with foreign powers while simultaneously accusing their opponents of being un-American.

Richardson points out that the Founders foresaw the danger of allowing foreign governments to interfere with U.S. politics but says that Trump and his allies have chosen to ignore this threat. Collusion between political candidates or lawmakers and foreign governments has been illegal since the earliest days of the U.S. republic, but Richardson says that the majority of Republican lawmakers refused to hold Trump accountable during his campaign or once he was in office. In 2019, Congress impeached Trump for refusing to release money it had approved for Ukraine’s defense against Russia unless the Ukrainian president agreed to help Trump in his campaign against Joe Biden. Richardson points out that the most eloquent defenses of American democracy in the impeachment hearings came from immigrants, who keep the Founders’ ideals alive by fighting for democracy and their own equality in the U.S. political system. By contrast, Republican senators acknowledged that Trump had tried to make a deal with Ukraine to benefit himself, but Richardson says that because they did not want to lose their political advantage, they voted to acquit him.

Richardson posits that Trump intended to use the executive office to advance his authoritarian agenda. Immediately after his inauguration, he made claims that his inauguration crowd had been bigger than Obama’s, despite clear evidence to the contrary. The press treated this lie as petty and ridiculous, but Richardson argues that it is typical of the gaslighting techniques used by authoritarian leaders to destabilize a country. By eroding the truth, at first in seemingly inconsequential ways, the authoritarian strongman presents himself as the only one who can make sense of the world. The American press, Richardson states, was unprepared to counter this kind of disinformation. Throughout his presidency, Trump took steps to ensure he could remain in power, such as attempting to prevent first the use and then the counting of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his use of inflammatory rhetoric, Richardson asserts, Trump also encouraged violent mobs of his followers, such the neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. By the end of Trump’s term, Richardson argues that the military had long foreseen the threat Trump posed to the nation, but Trump had attempted to create his own army of loyalists within federal agencies.

Read about how Cox implicates Donald Trump in a discussion of Main Idea #2: Movement conservatism can lead to authoritarianism.

In the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, insurrection, movement conservatives continued to advance the authoritarian agenda of Trump’s presidency, argues Richardson. Trump and his surrogates continued to insist that the election had been stolen from him, a claim known as the Big Lie. Richardson writes that, like Hitler and other authoritarians, Trump understands the power of telling a lie so brazen that people believe it because they cannot imagine anyone lying about something so demonstrably untrue. Trump faced impeachment again after January 6, but despite having faced mortal danger during the insurrection, only 17 Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in voting to convict him, says Richardson. Even out of office, Trump commands such power in the Republican Party that he has purged his enemies. Richardson notes that Trump’s loyalists have taken further steps to destroy the liberal consensus by continuing to compromise voting rights and by arguing that state legislatures should be allowed to determine the victor in presidential elections. Richardson closes Part 2 by arguing that Trump’s followers have left the country on the brink of fascist hierarchy by rejecting the promises of equality made in the Declaration of Independence.

Read about Main Idea #1: The historical idea of equality in the United States supports inclusivity.

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