Has the Opposition to Donald Trump Become Overheated?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has been moving in whirlwind fashion to upend the established political order in the United States, via executive orders and other means. This has obviously created tremendous opposition, as one after another political sacred cow is bulldozed in a matter of days.

Has some of the criticism of President Trump crossed the line into hyperbole and scaremongering? It’s early days yet and therefore too soon to know. Still, in just the past few weeks, Yale University professors, British historians, New York Times op-ed writers, and Canadian rock stars, among others, have taken to calling the country a “police state,” a new Nazi “Reich,” a “fascist” nation, and so on. Indeed, even here in Canada, “Trump” seems to be the ballot question in the coming election.

Jason Stanley, an American scholar of fascism, has argued that both Canada and Ukraine are now “bordered by autocratic dictatorships,” by which he means the United States and Russia. He is one of three prominent Yale academics – the others are historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore – who are relocating to the University of Toronto this fall, driven by concerns over America’s political climate and academic freedom.

Snyder and Shore had reportedly been courted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School for years, but recent political shifts accelerated their decision. Shore hinted that the November 2024 elections and fears of democratic erosion played a role, calling the climate an “American descent into fascism.”

Stanley, who calls himself an “academic refugee,” is known for his bestselling book How Fascism Works. He warned that universities are failing to protect students and faculty from government overreach. He claimed he seeks to “send a warning to Americans” by relocating to Canada.

Stanley has been warning about the threat and rise of fascism in the United States since Donald Trump’s first term. He sees a connection to Hitler’s Third Reich, given fascism’s reliance on the identification of internal enemies, and its promise of restoring a mythic past. 

“Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime. People are not responding well,” Stanley, who will begin a new role this fall as the Bissell-Heyd chair in American Studies on the Toronto campus, remarked in an interview with Vanity Fair.

“The federal government is a fascist regime,” Stanley continued. “But fascism has to permeate the whole society. They’re trying to replace everyone with loyalists. And that’s a process. They’re pretty far along.”

However, many X commentors disagreed, with one calling it a “Vanity affair indeed.”

British historian Richard Evans, who has written extensively on Hitler’s Germany, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy, is more circumspect. In an article in the magazine Prospect, he asserts that “Donald Trump has been waging a relentless and comprehensive war on American democracy and its institutions. There seems to be general agreement that Trump poses a threat to American democracy, just as Hitler did to German democracy. Yet, he warns, there are differences too, and many academics “have been cautious about drawing parallels.”

Peter Hayes, for instance, a respected author of studies of German industry and the Nazis as well as books on the Holocaust, finds some such parallels “exaggerated,” while Christopher Browning, a leading authority on the origins of the Holocaust, contrasts Hitler’s focus on the concept of racial struggle with Trump’s narcissistic drive for praise and personal advantage.

Russian-born author and journalist Masha Gessen is less sanguine. In a New York Times commentary of April 2, she declared that “Our Police State Has Arrived.” Citing numerous cases involving “unmarked vans, secret lists,” and “public denunciations,” she warned that “(t)hose of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.” This very vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who now calls New York home, concluded that “The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.”

Toronto-born musician Neil Young, who is now an American citizen, says he “may be barred” from entering the United States over comments he made about President Donald Trump. In an April 1 post on his website, Young worried that “When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket.”

He continued: “That’s right folks, if you say anything bad about Trump or his administration, you may be barred from re-entering the USA. If you are Canadian. If you are a dual citizen like me, who knows? We’ll all find that out together.”

“If the fact that I think Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of our great country could stop me from coming back, what does that say for Freedom?” (In actual fact, an American citizen may be detained or arrested for whatever reason but cannot be prevented from re-entering the country.)

What are we to make of all this? Is it hysteria or prophecy? Clearly, the 2026 midterm elections will be crucial, because if the Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives they will, at the very least, try to impeach Trump.

Is So-Called “Lawfare” a Threat to Democracy?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Has so-called “lawfare,” where politicians have been barred from running for office after being singled out and convicted of crimes, become antithetical to democratic norms? Two recent European cases come to mind.

In late March, France’s Marine Le Pen was banned from running for political office over the next five years, including the 2027 presidential race, after a Paris court convicted her of embezzlement. The National Rally (RN) party leader, who currently sits as a member of the French National Assembly, was found guilty of using European Parliament money to pay staff who were actually working for the RN.

During her time as a member of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017, Le Pen and her team paid RN staff with funds that should have gone to European parliamentary aides.

A Paris court also handed Le Pen, who was the frontrunner for the next presidential election, a four-year prison sentence with two years suspended, to be served under house arrest, and a $154,000 fine. Her party was ordered to pay about $3.12 million in fines for the almost $6.9 million that it was accused of embezzling.

Bénédicte de Perthuis, the court’s president, said that Le Pen had committed “a serious and lasting attack on the rules of democratic life in Europe.” While not able to participate in future elections, she will be able to continue to serve her current post as a parliamentary member representing Pas-de-Calais. She has appealed the verdict.

Le Pen had previously run three times for president of France, with the most recent bid in 2022 when she was defeated by President Emmanuel Macron. She was able to obtain over 41 per cent of the vote. According to previous polls, Le Pen was on track to replace Macron, who cannot seek a third term in office. She has called it a “witch hunt.”

“Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: It was French democracy that was is being executed,” RN President Jordan Bardella said. The fact that it involved a five-year ban on running for office, coupled with the judge’s insistence that this part of his ruling be immediately enforced rather than only after appeals have been exhausted, made it appear even more partisan.

Bardella took over from Le Pen as president of the party in 2022 and led the RN to victory in the 2024 European election in France. He also managed to send a record number of parliamentarians to the National Assembly after Macron called a snap election just weeks later. If Bardella runs as the party’s presidential candidate in 2027 and wins, he might conceivably still be able to appoint Le Pen as his prime minister.

The verdict sent shock waves to many politicians on the right. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban condemned the verdict. “Je suis Marine!” a post from Orban’s X account read. Even President Donald Trump weighed in. The conviction was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website. Elon Musk drove home the point: “Free Le Pen!” Musk echoed on X. Vice President JD Vance and others have also accused liberals in America of using the law to quash democratic choice.

The conviction of Le Pen is the latest stage of Europe’s “descent into the abyss of totalitarianism,” according to former Greece finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. He called the charges “laughable and ludicrous,” and to make them “a jailable offence and also a reason to bar her from running in the presidential election” was “mindboggling. Either the law applies to everyone, or it applies to no one.”

It is obvious that Le Pen has been sentenced for something that often results in a slap on the hand. For example, Christine Lagarde, today the president of the European Central Bank, escaped punishment and kept her job as managing director of the International Monetary Fund despite a conviction in 2016 on negligence charges over a state payout made while she served as France’s finance minister in 2008. Le Pen’s case, though, demonstrates the left’s hatred for anything that challenges their hegemony

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, who is the head of the populist party Lega, alleged that the French government is “afraid” of the voters’ judgement. “In Paris they have condemned Marine Le Pen and would like to exclude her from political life – an ugly film that we are also seeing in other countries such as Romania,” he stated on X. “The ruling against Marine Le Pen is a declaration of war by Brussels.”

Varoufakis, too, criticized the electoral ban of Romania’s right-wing presidential frontrunner, Calin Georgescu, labelling that decision “preposterous.” He compared that ban with the Le Pen conviction, stating: “The Romanian case was the dress rehearsal. Now, they’ve moved on to Le Pen.”

Last November Georgescu, who is no fan of NATO and admires Russian president Vladimir Putin, won the first round of Romania's presidential election with 23 per cent of the vote. Then the constitutional court scrapped the entire election in an unprecedented move, citing intelligence that Georgescu’s online campaign had been helped by Russia. A do-over balloting will be held in May, but Georgescu has been barred from participating. We have yet to see how this will play out.