LATIKA M BOURKE: Donald Trump’s second term Presidency shows ‘dictator-chic’ tendencies, says Doug Sosnik

Leading Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik says Donald Trump is displaying “dictator-chic” tendencies and, unlike his first term, there are now no guardrails around the US President.

Mr Sosnik, who was political director to Bill Clinton and is known for his spicy memos assessing US politics, said Mr Trump was testing the judiciary in real-time.

He said that the Democrats had not articulated a vision of what they stood for, other than defeating President Trump for a decade, and had to avoid going down “cul-de-sacs” on cultural issues if they wanted to take back the White House from MAGA.

Speaking exclusively to the Latika Takes podcast, Mr Sosnik said Mr Trump was seeing how far he could bend the institutions to his will.

Asked if that was fascism, he offered another phrase, pointing to Mr Trump’s newly pimped out Oval Office.

“ I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to look at how he’s redesigned the Oval Office,” he said.

“ So we call that Dictator-chic.

“ There are a lot of aspects to how he’s operating that fall under the heading of ‘Dictator Chic.’”

Mr Sosnik, now a senior adviser at Brunswick Group, said he had warned his private clients last year that if Mr Trump won a second term, people had no idea how different the President would be in his second term compared to his first and how that would change the United States.

“But I had no idea that it would be like this,” Mr Sosnik said.

“This was not in my wildest imagination how far Trump would go.”

Mr Trump has been virtually unchallenged as he has expanded his use of presidential powers. His administration has deployed troops to LA to support the forcible detention and deportation of immigrants being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are often wearing masks.

He has ordered the National Guard to take control of the US capital, Washington DC, citing a crackdown on crime and threatened to send troops to the city of Chicago, which is run by a black Democratic mayor and governed at the state level by Democrat JB Pritzker.

The US President has repeatedly joked about seeking a third term, something he is constitutionally barred from doing.

Mr Trump and his vaccine-sceptic Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr have fired the heads of independent bodies, including the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

Asked why there had been so little resistance in the US, Mr Sosnik said Mr Trump had been successful in taking over the Republican party and attacking sources of dissent, including the media and universities.

“What’s happened is there really aren’t any guardrails on Trump,” he said.

“He is testing the judiciary in real time every day to see how far he can push it to bend his will, and he’s mostly pleased with how that’s going.

“And Republicans, albeit quite narrowly, have control of both the House and the Senate, and since the party’s full MAGA, he’s really getting virtually no resistance from Congress.

“He’s also gone after the press, and the mainstream press is far less powerful now in America than it was in the past.

“And he’s looking at other places like universities and places of dissent.”

Mr Sosnik was unable to judge whether the effects of the second Trump Administration would be permanent, but believed US allies who had ridden out the first Trump term were reassessing America differently now the President had been endorsed a second time by the American people.

Trolling Trump is a tactic, not a strategy

One of the few voices of opposition to emerge has been California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is widely regarded to be considering a run for the Democratic primary for the 2028 election.

Mr Newsom has been trolling Mr Trump on social media, copying the President’s blunt and insulting tactics and warned that the President is trying to rig the next election in plain sight, after failing to do so in 2020 with the January 6 insurrection.

Asked if Mr Newsom’s approach was the template for the Democrats to revive, Mr Sosnik was lukewarm.

“ Sort of – and I’ll tell you why I say sort of – yes, it is the way forward in the sense that … the Democrats are at their lowest level of favorability since the Wall Street Journal began polling in the early 1990s,” he said.

That poll found in July that the Democrats had plummeted to their lowest-ever favourability rating in 35 years, with 63 per cent backing the Republicans to better manage election-deciding issues.

“One out of four Democrats right now has an unfavourable view of the party,” Mr Sosnik said.

“So I think it is important for us as Democrats to be able to stop the atrophy and at least bring the Democrats back in the fold.

“Democrats want to see us in a fight and they want to see us contrasting Trump and standing up to Trump because I think there is a sense that Trump (has) dictatorship tendencies, and there’s very little resistance anywhere in our country.

“So I think it’s a good tactic now, but it’s not a strategy for taking back the White House,” he said.

No cultural cul-de-sacs

Mr Sosnik said the Demorcrat party base was now majority progressive and could, for the first time in seven decades, choose a progressive populist rather than a pragmatist for its next presidential candidate.

Mr Sosnik said while it was still “the economy stupid” — a catchphrase coined by the Clinton Administration, the “animating ideology” in American politics was now populism.

“And it’s populism from the left and the right,” he said.

“Economic populism is going to be critical for Democrats going forward because we have to deal with what people care about.

“We can’t go down these cul-de-sacs of focusing on cultural issues that are well outside the mainstream.

“We have to be the party of opportunity.

“We have to, as a party, be able to create a set of policies that will enable these people who don’t have a four-year college degree become part of the middle class in America and to thrive.

“And if they work hard, they can get ahead.

“And that is singularly the most important thing we need to do as a party, so I guess in a sense, yes, it is the economy, stupid.”

The Democrats’ leading populists are considered to be the veteran Senator Bernie Sanders, aged 83, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020 and 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who leads the left-wing bloc called the Squad.

Mr Sosnik forecast a generational “changing of the guard”ei nside the party once the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens grip on the party had thwarted.

“There is really no party leadership and the party hasn’t stood for anything in 10 years,” he said.

“But also for the last quarter of a century, with the exception of 2008, the party’s been dominated by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and the Obama Biden administration.

“So we haven’t really reckoned with who we are and what we stand for but we also really haven’t enabled a generation of leadership to emerge.

“ So we really don’t know who’s got the right stuff to be able to run for president.”