Much has been made of the way Donald Trump legitimized the brutal and murderous dictator Kim Jong-un in the wake of their Singapore summit earlier this week. Trump told Greta Van Susteren: “He’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that.”
That Trump would thusly describe a man who keeps more than 100,000 people in gulags and had—to take just one example—his uncle executed by means of machine guns and flamethrowers is both horrifying and unsurprising. He’s also praised Vladimir Putin and invited the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to the White House.
What’s almost as troubling as Trump’s legitimizing of Kim is the way he seems to be internalizing Kim’s dictatorial tendencies. On Friday morning, the president’s favorite TV show, Fox and Friends, broadcast from the White House lawn. Trump made an “impromptu” appearance. The president spoke effusively of Kim again, and then said, “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Twitter exploded and fake news outlets fired up their engines to say that Trump was demanding loyalty from all Americans, when he was clearly referring to his staff (“my people”). You have to take Trump’s statement in the context of his remarks.
But what he actually did say looks plenty disturbing when you put it into an even broader context. On Wednesday, RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel tweeted the following:
Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) June 14, 2018
When the inevitable backlash to the suggestion that Americans should demonstrate fealty to the president hit, McDaniel tried to clarify, pointing to the original statement she made in an interview with Lou Dobbs and blaming Twitter’s 240 character count: “We have got a lot more to do, and we cannot risk losing that in these midterms. So, complacency is going to be our enemy, and anyone who doesn’t embrace the Trump agenda and doesn’t recognize the issues that propelled us to victory in the White House is going to be making a mistake.”
Sorry. When you’re trying to defend a guy with more than 37,900 lifetime tweets, you don’t get to blame the platform. You understand the power of the medium and the weight it carries.
Such expectations of loyalty are not new for Trump. It was at the heart of his conflict with James Comey. It propels his on-again, off-again attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
But Trump seems to be emboldened these days about public expectations of fealty. His demand to Comey was made during a private dinner. His public complaints about Sessions are largely about how the AG recused himself from the Russia investigation—the demand for loyalty is limited to subtext.
The president now feels comfortable standing on the White House lawn and telling an audience of millions that he expects his people—many of whom have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, not an oath to serve Donald J. Trump—to express absolute loyalty.
It can be cringeworthy when #resistance types bemoan that fascism is upon us. Trump is not a dictator. He’s not Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin or even Viktor Orbán (yet). But he sure does seem to be a little jealous of those guys and what they can get away with.
The question from Steve Doocy that prompted Trump’s quote about wanting his people to sit up at attention was this: “Are we close to seeing Mr. Kim here at the White House?”
Trump was non-committal on an actual visit from his new friend. But in a way, it doesn’t matter. Kim Jong-un is already in the White House, living rent-free in the president’s head.
