Citizens United, Donald Trump, & The Politics Of Fear – CleanTechnica

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Thomas Edsall writes a weekly column for the New York Times that focus on politics, demographics, and inequality. This week, he wrote a column about how the infamous Citizens United decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts fourteen years ago has come back on its proponents in a way no one ever imagined. It has given Donald Trump a weapon to turn America into a quasi-criminal enterprise based on extortion, intimidation, and fear.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, told Edsall that some of the conservative victories in campaign finance law — particularly Citizens United — have strengthened “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors. He said there has always been, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”

What is different today is the potential for extortion — a consequence of Citizens United that no one fully appreciated at the time that case was decided. The irony of inviting big donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that it strengthened the inappropriate relationship between donors and Trump. Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on them in the belief that it “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it. Trump’s mafia modus operandi can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”

Because of the “hostile dependency relationship” enabled by Citizens United, wealthy donors who swore not to support Donald Trump after the madness of January 6, 2021 are begging the malodorous magalomaniac of Mar-A-Lago to take their money. Why? Because they fear the Wrath Of Trump will smite them severely if they do not.

According to the Washington Post, Trump has warned that he will weaponize the federal bureaucracy to punish those who do not toe the MAGA line or who fail to support his campaign with sufficient largess. Trump has made retribution a central theme of his campaign. Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors seem to think they have little choice but to pony up large amounts of cash to help the self-proclaimed “dictator for one day” get elected.

Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation — an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy, whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology professor at Princeton, told Edsall, “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected — tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want, little realizing (although the historic precedents are numerous) that, “once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.” It allows political leaders to “threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrat’s demands.”

Conservative institutions like the Charles Koch-backed Heritage Society are putting together a blueprint for dismantling democracy in America with a plan called Project 2025. Edsall calls it a direct copy of what Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president and allow him to control the entire federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late, he writes.

Gutless Billionaires Kowtow to Trump

Nowhere is corporate obeisance to Trump more evident than among Republican mega-donors who swore after January 6, 2021 that they would never again support him. Now they are swallowing their pride, tossing aside any scruples they may have once had, and shamelessly sucking up to the man who betrayed his country by encouraging the January 6 insurrection.

In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund raiser, told Politico, “I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate. He is a metastasizing cancer who, if he is not stopped, is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. He added that Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he had had a change of heart. “Reluctantly and with reservations, I have decided I will vote for Trump in November,” he said. Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, 2024, four reporters for the Washington Post chronicled how other “elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems, and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency, are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free January 6 defendants, promises mass deportations, and faces 88 felony charges.”

Here’s another spineless jellyfish who is crawling back on his knees. The day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, billionaire and GOP mega-donor Nelson Peltz called the insurrection a “disgrace” and expressed remorse for voting for Donald Trump: “I’m sorry I did that.” Yet in March, Peltz hosted a breakfast meeting at his Palm Beach mansion with Trump and billionaire Trump backers Steve Wynn and Isaac Perlmutter.

Billionaire developer Robert Bigelow said Trump had “lost me as a supporter” after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Now he has put his scruples in cold storage and pledged $20 million to a pro-Trump campaign group. He has also  given $1 million to cover the former president’s legal costs. Bigelow was on the host committee for a record-setting $50.5 million fundraiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Palm Beach on April 7, 2024. The suggested price of admission ranged from $250,000 to $814,600 per person.

Principles Go Out The Window

Writing on Substack, Chris Cillizza said, “I will now explain to you how these wealthy people overcame their principled stances against Trump as a threat to democracy. The answer to all of your questions is money. Most rich people want to stay as rich as possible. Or get even richer. That is their main focus. So, when rubber meets road, that is their default setting. Principles go out the window.”

Just as Trump has cowed congressional Republicans — many of whom privately voice strong criticism of him — with the threat of MAGA-driven primary challenges, he has turned himself and his agenda into weapons of intimidation for businesses seeking to survive and thrive in a second Trump administration.

A primary goal of business is predictability based in part on consistent rules, regulations, and laws so that corporations can make plans and investments without worrying about arbitrary government interventions based on the revenge-seeking whims of a leader many see as a malignant narcissist. American business is fully aware of Trump’s willingness to govern by caprice, a modus operandi he demonstrated repeatedly during his term in the White House.

Trump frequently deployed economic and regulatory powers against businesses deemed insufficiently loyal. For example, his administration launched a bogus antitrust investigation into some auto companies when they did not support his rollback of fuel efficiency standards. He also instructed his top economic aide to interfere with the merger of AT&T and Time Warner as punishment for critical coverage from CNN, which was then owned by Time Warner.

V For Vendetta & Trump

Make no mistake, a second Trump term will seem very much like a reprise of the 2005 movie “V For Vendetta.” Trump’s allies, especially those focused on Project 2025, are working tirelessly to make sure if Trump wins in November he will not be restrained by aides or career civil servants and that he will have a complete MAGA agenda in place ready to be implemented on Day 1. That agenda will consist of legislative initiatives, executive orders, and regulatory changes from anti-abortion policies to a strategy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” in the words of one of the authors of Project 2025. Don Corleone would be envious of such power.

What sorts of changes might Trump bring to the national government? Kiss the Inflation Reduction Act goodbye. Same for the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and bans on forever chemicals in drinking water. Say hello to fracking in every community in America, 16 new LNG terminals in the Gulf of Mexico, more oil and gas drilling on federal lands, and lots more pipelines and oil trains. Lowering America’s carbon and methane emissions? Forget about it. That will be number 1,467 on Trump’s to do list.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the rush by US automakers to increase their offerings of hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars is their way of preparing for the decimation of clean transportation policies at the federal level. California will surely lose its waiver that allows it to set its own exhaust emissions standards which will lead to the other states who follow the California rules to walk away from them as well. In fact, Connecticut and Maine have already started doing so.

Citizens United & The Mafia Mind Set

Donald Trump is the world’s biggest loser. His whole career has been one business failure after another — Trump Airline, Trump Steaks, Trump University, and a Trump casino in Atlantic City were all disasters. He should teach a course at his alma mater, the Wharton School, on how not to do business. His whole existence is based on a myth. Most people forget he was a disciple of Roy Cohn, the lunatic who counseled Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon on the power of illusion. He was also enthralled by Vince McMahon, the impresario who created the WWE, which featured the illusion of sport over the real thing.

Citizens United has turned US elections into a quasi-criminal enterprise. Greed and fear now reinforce each other. Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at NYU, told Edsall, “Trump governs in a swirl of corruption and intimidation. Everyone knows this and understands that in such regimes, proximity to power is key to government largess. In oligarchic regimes we see this in the sheer population concentrations in the capital city. Here, aspirants flock to Mar-a-Lago.”

One cannot afford to be distant from the heart of power when perks are doled out on a one-by-one basis by cronies of the top commander of the country. The rush to Trump does not represent policy agreements with the Trump tax cuts or anything like that. Many of those rushing to Trump actually had their taxes go up because of his retaliation against blue states through the elimination of the local tax property deduction. Edsall concludes with this observation: “They are eager to contribute, and to be seen as contributing, because power and privilege flow from proximity. Trump may view himself as a latter day Louis XIV, including in his love of gilt. But in more recent times, this is the governance style of the banana republic dictators of the 20th century and the populist anti-democrats of the 21st.”

The Takeaway

Trump is the person half of all Americans are flocking to as their savior? Here’s a news flash, people. Trump doesn’t care a flying fig leaf about you and your litany of petty grievances. He cares only about himself and his need to justify his pitiful existence to his long dead father. What a sorry excuse for a leader he is. For this coward, people are willing to obliterate the founding principles of America? Get a clue.

Donald Trump is a death sentence for the idea of America expressed in the Constitution. The people who wrote that document were well acquainted with the evils of an autocratic government. They fully understood the power of government should not be concentrated in the hands of a few. They labored long and hard to craft a system of government based on a separation of powers. Conservatives should be committed to preserving that architecture of liberty, but instead are intent on destroying the boundaries between the branches of government. They conspire to appoint judges and elect members of Congress who will gladly cede their constitutional authority to the executive branch. They are determined to tear down the separation of powers concept and create an all powerful executive branch ruled by a bellowing blowhard.

John F. Kennedy once wrote a book called Profiles In Courage. Trump and his sycophants are busy writing the sequel — Profiles In Cowardice. How did the sons and daughters of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy allow themselves to be seduced by this huckster, this empty suit with the bad combover? At a time when we need bold action to move America forward toward a low carbon future, we cannot allow our goals to be perverted by this gold-plated ghoul. Think before you vote. Trump will destroy America. Don’t help him do it.