If Donald Trump believes any person stands between himself and power, he will brand them a criminal and threaten them with prison. He has said this about a wide array of Democrats, including all three presidential opponents he’s faced, numerous journalists, election officials, and a wide array of other targets.
Trump has recently added Google to his list of targets, insisting fantastically, ““It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris” and that “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Trump’s most devoted fans agree with this goal. His more embarrassed supporters wave it off as harmless rhetoric he’ll never be able to carry out. And whether Trump would be successful in his goal of corrupting the Justice Department to the point where it is used as his personal weapon is, to be sure, unknowable. The mere chance of success ought to be enough to disqualify him, but it is true that that chance is less than 100 percent.
But his comments in Chicago Tuesday reveal other tools Trump has to advance the same objective. Trump can use regulatory power against those he wishes to intimidate.
The moderator, John Micklethwait, asked Trump about breaking up Google, a goal pursued by the Biden administration for economic reasons. Trump (after first answering the question with a non sequitur about alleged illegal voting in Virginia) made clear his decision criteria are entirely political:
Google has been bad to me. Very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. In other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories and everyone is entitled to that, you’ll only see the 20 bad stories. And I called the head of Google the other day and I said, ‘I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google. I think it is a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged.’
After listening to Trump describe a chilling shakedown, Micklethwait then asked him about TikTok (“You just talked about Chinese technology, the need to defend against it. The threat people see to American children”), but Trump returned to the subject of Google:
I think it is a threat. I think everything is a threat. There is nothing that is not a threat. Sometimes you have to fight through these threats. Like Google, I’m not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. Are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair. They do treat me very badly.
He told me, ‘no way, you are the number one person on all of Google for stories.’ Which probably makes sense … Most of them are bad stories, but these are minor details, right? It has only bad because of the fake news, because the news is really fake. That’s the one we really have to straighten out, we have to straight out our press, because we have a corrupt press.
That last line is especially revealing. He’s using “straighten out” in the sense it’s employed in in The Godfather — “We had a little argument, Freddie and I, so I had to straighten him out” — which means, quite the opposite of reforming something, that you establish authority over a victim to bring him into line.
Trump did attempt to “straighten out the press” during his first term by putting selective regulatory pressure on its owners. He blocked a merger benefitting CNN and denied a lucrative Pentagon contract to Amazon to punish the owners of independent media. Trump says the press is “corrupt,” but corruption is the very method he is employing publicly to bring the major news organs into line.
The public discussion of Trump’s authoritarianism has suffered from an unfortunate tendency to view the issue in binary terms, as if the only alternative possibilities were that Trump is Hitler redux or that he poses no threat to the republic. Political systems can be more or less democratic. Trump would almost certainly push the United States further on the spectrum away from democracy and closer toward authoritarianism. How far he would go is difficult to predict.
But the notion he has no powers of abuse available to him is a fanciful justification from his enablers. A reelected Trump would be perfectly able to abuse power. He is already planning his crimes and broadcasting them in public.
