Can Trump Be Toppled Without Bloodshed?

Melania avoids being seen anywhere near Trump as much as she can and I bet it isn't just because she loathes him. She's from Slovenia, separated from Romania by a stretch of southern Hungary. In 1989, she was just 19 years old, a model and prostitute in her hometown and in nearby Ljubljana and she remembers well when Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena fled their palace and were arrested and summarily executed in Târgoviște, a small town in the southern part of the country. Elena shrieked, "You sons of bitches!" as she was being dragged to a wall to be shot. (120 bullets were found in the couple's bodies. The following year, the revolutionary government responsible for the execution, abolished capital punishment.)

Anyway... Melania doesn't want to wind up against a wall and shot just because she's married to a fascist pig. And yesterday The Atlantic published a piece by Franklin Foer, The Trump Regime Is Beginning To Topple. No doubt Melania hopes when they come and drag Trump out of the White House, they overlook her and grab Ivanka instead. "Over the course of his presidency," wrote Foer, "Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts-- and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali."

No doubt Melania likes that "non-violent" description but I'm sure she's thinking of the horrifying photos she saw-- an impressionable a 19 yearly hooker-- of First Lady Elena Ceaușescu, being dragged out of a kangaroo court kicking and screaming

to a wall to be shot like a dog

Foer though predicts that "Trump’s time in office will end with an election and not an ouster, it is only possible to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing and to map what comes next by looking to these antecedents from abroad. As in the case of many such revolutions, two battles are being waged in America. One is a long struggle against a brutal and repressive ideology. The other is a narrower fight over the fate of a particular leader. The president rose to power by inflaming racial tensions. He now finds his own fate enmeshed in the struggle against police brutality and racism.

The most important theorist of nonviolent revolutions is the late political scientist Gene Sharp. A conscientious objector during the Korean War who spent nine months in prison, Sharp became a close student of Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles. His work set out to extract the lessons of the Indian revolt against the British. He wanted to understand the weaknesses of authoritarian regimes-- and how nonviolent movements could exploit them. Sharp distilled what he learned into a 93-page handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, a how-to guide for toppling autocracy.

Sharp’s foundational insight is embedded in an aphorism: “Obedience is at the heart of political power.” A dictator doesn’t maintain power on his own; he relies on individuals and institutions to carry out his orders. A successful democratic revolution prods these enablers to stop obeying. It makes them ashamed of their complicity and fearful of the social and economic costs of continued collaboration.

Sharp posited that revolutionaries should focus first on the regime’s softest underbelly: the media, the business elites, and the police. The allegiance of individuals in the outer circle of power is thin and rooted in fear. By standing strong in the face of armed suppression, protesters can supply examples of courage that inspire functionaries to stop carrying out orders, or as Sharp put it, to “withhold cooperation.” Each instance of resistance provides the model for further resistance. As the isolation of the dictators grows-- as the inner circles of power join the outer circle in withholding cooperation-- the regime crumbles.

This is essentially what transpired in Ukraine in 2014. When the country’s president backed away from plans to join the European Union, a crowd amassed in Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The throngs initially had no avowed intention or realistic hope of overthrowing the kleptocratic president, Viktor Yanukovych. But instead of letting the demonstrators shout themselves hoarse in the thick of subfreezing winter, Yanukovych set about violently confronting them. This tactic backfired horribly. A movement with limited aims became a full-blown revolution. Oligarchs quietly slunk away from a leader they had long subsidized. Lackeys who had faithfully served the regime resigned, for fear of attracting the public’s ire. In the bitter end, Yanukovych found himself isolated, alone with his own family and his Russian advisers, destined for exile.

It is astonishing how events in the U.S., despite all the obvious imperfections of the analogy, have traced the early phases of this history. This is observable in the images of the crowds on successive nights, as Trump’s violent suppression of the protests in Lafayette Square has only caused their ranks to swell. And it’s possible to see how elites, in the course of just a few days, have begun to withhold cooperation, starting with the outer circles of power and quickly turning inward.

Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s posts as misleading was a hinge moment. For years, the company had provided the president with a platform for propaganda and a mechanism for cowing his enemies, a fact that long irked both critics outside Twitter and employees within. Only when Trump used Twitter to threaten violence against the protests did the company finally limit the ability of users to see or share a tweet.

Once Twitter applied its rules to Trump-- and received accolades for its decision-- it inadvertently set a precedent. The company had stood strong against the bully, and showed that there was little price to pay for the choice. A large swath of S&P 500 companies soon calculated that it was better to stand in solidarity with the protests, rather than wait for their employees to angrily pressure them to act.

A cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trump’s commands. After the president insisted that governors “dominate” the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. Indeed, New York and Virginia rebuffed a federal request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. Even the suburb of Arlington, Virginia, pulled its police that had been loaned to control the crowd in Lafayette Square.

As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesn’t fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the president’s very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. It’s among the most striking instances of an official bucking a president in recent decades.

The examples of Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia show how even the subservient unexpectedly break from a leader once that leader is doomed to illegitimacy. And to an extent, the cycle of abandonment has already begun. Jim Mattis’s excoriation of his old boss prodded Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to echo his condemnation of the president. As each defector wins praise for moral courage, it incentivizes the next batch of defectors.

Even if the protests fizzle-- and the parade of denunciations comes to an end-- it’s worth pausing to marvel at the moment. Despite the divisions of the country, a majority of its people joined together in shared abhorrence of the president, at least for an instant. Sectors of society that studiously avoid politics broke with their reticence. In a dark era, when it seemed beyond the moral capacities of the nation, it mustered the will to disobey.

And what about Trump's henchmen in Congress, who have legitimized his regime and give it the patina of legitimacy? The anti-Trump wave is getting stronger by the day. Yesterday, George W. Bush, Colin Powell and Mitt Romney all said they would not support Trump's reelection and would not vote for him. Will other senators join Murkowski and Romney? What about Susan Collins (R-ME)? Cory Gardner (R-CO) is a lost cause. So are Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Thom Tillis (R-NC), David Perdue (R-GA), #LadyG (R-SC), Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Steve Daines (R-MT). They've all worked to look like they're connected to Trump at the hip. That will come back to bite each of them in November-- as well as Mitch McConnell (R-KY). And now... the exciting new Lincoln Project add that was just released.