The first rule in the dictator’s playbook is to fuel public anger against the “other” – people said to be dangerous outsiders.
From the start of his campaign for president, Donald Trump has sought to make immigrants from Mexico and Latin America the nation’s nemesis.
The second rule in the playbook is to conjure up a so-called “crisis” of containing the outsiders.
Undocumented immigration into the United States dropped in 2017, but began to rise last year. March brought more than 92,000 apprehensions at the southwest border, the highest number reported in one month in a decade, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
But this is no crisis. It’s not a threat to national security. (Last November, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to ban Central Americans from seeking asylum on national security grounds.)
America is hardly “full”, as Trump has said. In fact, our aging population needs young immigrants to take up the slack.
Whatever problem this surge of migrants poses isn’t nearly the magnitude of threats like climate change, nuclear proliferation, or the undermining of democratic institutions – all of which, not incidentally, Trump has worsened.
The immediate problem is humanitarian. The surge is largely asylum-seeking families from Central America who have a right to have their claims heard by an immigration judge.
But because America doesn’t have enough immigration judges to make such decisions, families are being detained at the border. Even the Republican senator Ted Cruz proposes adding hundreds more such judges to clear the backlog.
Yet Trump has no intention of remedying the humanitarian problem. He wants a crisis to stir up his base and show how tough he is.
Which brings us to the third rule in the dictator’s playbook: use the trumped-up crisis to enlarge and entrench power.
When he’s not accusing Democrats of being socialists, Trump is rallying his followers around the supposed mob at the gates. At a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he claimed migrants are coached by lawyers to say “I’m very afraid for my life” although they look as strong as “the heavyweight champion of the world”.
This flies in the face of the recent warning by the former Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen that migrants – including children, two of whom have died in federal custody – are arriving “sicker than ever before”.
Which raises the fourth rule: use cruelty to spread fear.
Even though Nielsen committed every cruel act Trump wanted her to – putting migrant kids in cages, separating them from their parents, locking up both for long periods of time – he fired her anyway, apparently because she refused to employ even crueler illegal measures such as detaining children for more than the 20 days allowed by law.
Reportedly, Trump is considering forcing migrant families to choose between letting their children go, or spending months or perhaps years with them in jail.
All of which sets up the fifth rule: take power, unilaterally.
Trump’s “national emergency” to fund his border wall isn’t just an unconstitutional power grab. It’s a grab that shatters previous norms about how far a president can go in testing the limits of his power.
So too with shuttering parts of federal government for 35 days to get funding, threatening to close the border with Mexico, and stopping foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (a move likely to fuel even more migration by further destabilizing those nations).
Trump is now exploring ways to deny migrants a chance to seek asylum in the first place – a clear violation of American and international law. He has also toyed with shipping detained immigrants to sanctuary cities in order to retaliate and pressure them, according to the Washington Post.
For a president to behave as if he is above the law, or can unilaterally make it, violates the cardinal precept of democracy.
Which may be the real point of all of this for Trump. He seeks total control.
There are now 18 vacancies at the top of the Department of Homeland Security – including the secretary, deputy secretary, chief financial officer, two undersecretaries, the assistant secretary for policy, the director of the Secret Service, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (who is now acting secretary).
Reportedly, Trump also intends to fire the longtime head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This past week Trump rescinded the nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying, “We’re going in a tougher direction.”
How to explain this purge? Merely a change in policy?
Trump is also keeping vacant the top positions at every other department with any responsibility for border security, including defense and interior.
It’s about total control. “I like acting secretaries and directors,” Trump said in January. “It gives me more flexibility.”
It also gives him more power to do as he pleases.
Unconfirmed appointees will be loyal to him personally. Their authority is not dependent on Congress.
The final rule: destroy democracy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. He is also a columnist for Guardian US