Back of the Book: It can’t happen here?

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

I had trouble mustering much Independence Day fervor during the past July 4 holiday, what with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that makes the Spirit of ’76 all but obsolete.

“We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 decision handed down July 1.

What’s more, the ruling states that while a former president enjoys “absolute” immunity from prosecution for actions taken within their “core constitutional powers,” they also have “at least presumptive immunity” related to “acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”

President Joe Biden denounced the decision: “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America … no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States.”

It can.

The immunity ruling becomes even more chilling when taken in the context of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” which envisions the establishment of a dictatorship under “the next conservative president.” If that sounds alarmist, consider the section of the document titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise related to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In that 35-page chapter — posted along with the rest of the Mandate at project2025.org/policy — the authors wrote, “the DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies.” What’s more, the Mandate states, assistant U.S. attorneys and other prosecutors have taken “positions that are inconsistent with the interests of the President and his appointees in other places throughout the Administration.”

To combat this, Project 2025 states that as the DOJ falls under “the direct supervision and control” of the president, litigation other than criminal prosecutions “must be made consistent with the President’s agenda,” and systematically removes job protections across the federal government to make way for political appointees.

Not only did the Supreme Court just retroactively protect Donald Trump from his scores of illegal actions during and after his presidency, but Project 2025 has set the policy table for Trump — should he win the November election — to do exactly what he’s accused the DOJ of in the past: Using it as a legal flying squad to advance the president’s agenda and punish opponents.

That’s just one of thousands of hair-raising passages in the sprawling document, which states as its central goal to “deconstruct the Administrative State” and bring swaths of the government under the control of the Executive Branch.

Policy wonks call that “unitary executive theory.” The Germans had a word for something similar in the 1930s: Gleichschaltung, or “coordination,” which realigned the critical governmental and cultural elements of the German state under the control of the Nazi Party and, ultimately, its leader with unitary authority to leverage those functions to carry out the executive agenda.

Amid all this bad news, I’ve also been rereading It Can’t Happen Here, the 1935 semi-satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis, which speculated how a fascist dictatorship could come to capture the United States and what it might look like as it achieved political power and consolidated its hold.

The book wasn’t a smash hit when it was published, but reading it 89 years later is a bone-chilling experience: a huckster-ish demagogue promising national renewal and prosperity for all whips the country into a populist froth, spiced with antisemitism, anti-Black racism and misogyny, then rides those passions to the White House, where he quickly dismantles or contorts the preexisting structures of government to place himself above the law, relegate Congress to an afterthought full of terrified lickspittles, delegitimize the independent media, and enrich himself and his cronies through graft and lucrative political appointments.

As I watched the Fourth of July parade from the Reader office, I couldn’t help but think about all this and consider that while “it” hasn’t happened here (yet), there are clearly powerful forces at work to see that “it” will.