Ratcheting up the doomsaying, Rolling Stone magazine foretold dictatorial fire and brimstone as they asked the question, “What If Trump Wins?”
Next-level gaslighting appeared to be the modus operandi Monday as a revisionist history of how former President Donald Trump’s White House tenure ran the gamut of propaganda talking points.
Finding the GOP leader comparable to cult leaders and dictators, but somehow simultaneously thwarted by unnamed coddling aides, writers Tim Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng suggested, “Trump has positioned himself as an avatar of a collective revenge fantasy for his followers.”
“That mass executions were not a feature of Trump’s term is a credit to the American justice system and the more sober-minded government officials who were unwilling to be complicit in his mad schemes,” claimed the article, accrediting the lack of action not to hyperbole over talk of firing squads, but to those in the president’s inner circle. “These aides and advisers typically put the president off, making vague promises to ‘look into’ the idea, long enough to let Trump’s tyrannical tantrum blow over.”
Warning that if the president wins, “America will encounter a Trump unbound, a man whose darkest impulses will not be checked by ‘adults in the room’ — creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the American experiment,” the writers would go on to compare Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to WWII-era Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, supporters to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Trump himself to “Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte,” Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh and even Russian President (and Vice President Kamala Harris supporter) Vladimir Putin.
“Regaining the White House would put a naked abuse of power at Trump’s fingertips,” they decried.
Looking to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for comment, Rolling Stone cited the socialist lawmaker as saying, “This election is about whether or not we remain a democratic society or we move to authoritarianism,” and that Trump “does not believe in the basic tenets and foundations of American democracy.”
Yale professor and author of “How Fascism Works,” Jason Stanley, added, “We know from the first administration that Trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions.”
“The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” he continued as references were made to travel restrictions as a so-called Muslim ban and the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was called a coup attempt. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”
Additionally, Harvard law professor Michael Klarman found cause to associate the president with Project 2025 again, as Rolling Stone detailed his suggestion that the “masterminds of the Heritage Foundation’s extreme policy agenda” would be in his administration.
Of course, no rant against Trump would be complete without the demonization of the Supreme Court of which he had nominated three justices. Calling out their 6-3 ruling on presidential immunity, the writers argued that if that decision had been made prior to Jan. 6, Trump, who willingly left office to complete the peaceful transfer of power, would have attempted to prevent the inauguration of then-President-elect Joe Biden.
As they fleshed out their “Worst Case Scenario,” the prospect of day one authoritarianism found author and New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat asserting, “They want to have a blitzkrieg — and then all you need to be is a dictator for a day.”
“It’s not just a change of methods,” she added, “it’s a change of political system — a vast expansion of the powers of the execution, so that Trump will be able to rule as an autocrat.”
The penultimate projection came with the conclusion that the election was a choice between “upholding the norms of our republic” or putting “America on a dark path backward, toward mistrust, racial division, and unconstrained executive power.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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