Arresting Your Opponents

And why Laughing at Authoritarians is Serious

It is terrifying that our president is calling for the arrest and punishment of his direct political opponents—terrifying because we don’t even notice it.

This is not normal, but in the swirling toilet-bowl that is Donald Trump’s administration, the constant crises and chaos allow dangerous trends to take root. The president just ordered his attorney general to indict his election rival in the middle of the election. He called for the arrest of his predecessor, as well as the instant declassification of the exact same emails that he criticized Hillary Clinton for not treating as classified material. As usual, hypocrisy is Trump’s superpower.

Arresting your opponents? Are we living in Belarus? Ideas that are dismissed as crazy or meaningless talk by a fool do actually set dangerous precedents, and “crazy” Tweets can turn into actual steps. Even Richard Nixon went no further than spying on his opponents, or sending the tax authorities after them; he didn’t dare suggest arresting them, even during the disastrous collapse of his presidency.

Trump had already normalized his attempts to directly interfere in legal cases and investigations; he admires strongmen leaders overseas who bend justice to their needs, like Erdogan in Turkey, who purged over 100,000 critics from jobs across his country, and put tens of thousands in jail. Trump was thrilled when Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines intervened in a case to send a US Marine home, despite his conviction for murder. Authoritarian leaders decide legal cases as they want; Trump seeks that power. He is trying to make America grovel again. 

Laugh at him. Given the seriousness of the situation, laughter may seem light or pointless, mockery a feeble tool against a man calling for the Justice Department to detain opponents based on conspiracy theories. But laughter is always good medicine for us, and can beat back the fever in this country. During the Nixon era, comedy was a crucial response to the president’s power grabs and corruption. I have an album from my parents vinyl collection, called The Watergate Comedy Hour, a set of sketch routines about Nixon and his aides that was recorded in front of a live audience. Some of the gags still work—a non-sensical press conference proves that Ron Zeigler of 1972 was the equal of Kellyanne Conway or Kayliegh McEnany in 2020. 

(I’ve included some clips in the subscriber-only version of this newsletter. Sign up for a paid subscription and you can hear it too.)

Not all the jokes land—then or now. It’s hard to remember who Martha Mitchell was (the disobedient wife of the attorney general, who told the truth) or why Cubans were involved in the Watergate break-in. But the hubris and ego of that era are familiar in today’s Oval Office.

I remember Nixon’s resignation. We were sitting around a campfire in West Virginia when my parents got very grave and put a big portable radio on. We listened in silence as the President of the United States resigned live, one family among millions tuned to that national crisis.  I still remember the strange broken rocks where we sat, flat and red, a fractured geology so different from the red clay around my house in Virginia.

Nixon’s crimes were serious. Aside from lying and cheating through much of his electoral career, he intervened in national elections, violated campaign finance laws, and covered up his criminal conspiracies. But it seems almost childish in retrospect: America actually cared about a president who didn’t tell the truth. The cover-up was worse than the crime.

Today there is no cover-up. Just the crime. The Trump administration has flouted Hatch Act rules about campaigning for office on federal property, simply laughing them off without bothering to defend their actions legally. Trump’s outrageous and authoritarian threats to arrest his enemies are getting lost among his lesser, everyday corruptions. They are not a tool for other goals; they are the goal, the consolidation of permanent power. Merely threatening your opponents is intimidation and election-rigging. He got elected by calling for Hillary to go to jail. Now he is calling for everyone to go to jail. Obviously, that is the authoritarian’s ultimate tool—hijack democracy with violence or threats of violence.

Polls show Joe Biden will be our next president, but the authoritarian movement will not go away, and jailing your opponents is no longer an unprecedented idea. It has been normalized, one more hole in our democratic ship.

Laughter is our superpower. Make fools of them on Election Day and every day thereafter. Send Nixon back to Mar a Lago with jeers.