The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple – The Atlantic

Once Twitter applied its rules to Trumpand received accolades for its decisionit inadvertently set a precedent. The company had stood strong against the bully, and showed that there was little price to pay for the choice. A large swath of S&P 500 companies soon calculated that it was better to stand in solidarity with the protests, rather than wait for their employees to angrily pressure them to act.

A cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trumps commands. After the president insisted that governors dominate the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. Indeed, New York and Virginia rebuffed a federal request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.* Even the suburb of Arlington, Virginia, pulled its police that had been loaned to control the crowd in Lafayette Square.

As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharps taxonomy, the autocrats grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesnt fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the presidents very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trumps threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. Its among the most striking instances of an official bucking a president in recent decades.

Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal

The examples of Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia show how even the subservient unexpectedly break from a leader once that leader is doomed to illegitimacy. And to an extent, the cycle of abandonment has already begun. Jim Mattiss excoriation of his old boss prodded Trumps former chief of staff John Kelly and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to echo his condemnation of the president.** As each defector wins praise for moral courage, it incentivizes the next batch of defectors.

Even if the protests fizzleand the parade of denunciations comes to an endits worth pausing to marvel at the moment. Despite the divisions of the country, a majority of its people joined together in shared abhorrence of the president, at least for an instant. Sectors of society that studiously avoid politics broke with their reticence. In a dark era, when it seemed beyond the moral capacities of the nation, it mustered the will to disobey.

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Maryland among the states that have rebuffed a request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.

** This article previously misstated the first name of former White House chief of staff John Kelly.

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The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple - The Atlantic