Is Trump America's New Tokyo Rose?

Money-as-speech has metastasized so extensively it threatens to kill its host, ending democracy here and turning America into another Putin- or Orbán-style autocracy run by Trump...

Image by Dawn Rose from Pixabay

An international fascist movement — led by Russia, Hungary, and China — is on the march worldwide, and America is in its crosshairs.

Case in point: Ohio Republican Senator and maximally rich dude J.D. Vance, who dresses up his Trump/Putin toadyism in more elegant and acceptable garb than “bleach blonde bad-built butch body™” Marjorie Taylor Greene is capable of.

In an article for the elite Financial Times, Vance recently wrote:

“We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. ... And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.”

Instead of expressing shock at such a treason-weasel statement, the wise elders at Politico ran an article quoting him that was headlined: “J.D. Vance Has a Point.”

Just a week earlier, Vance had tried to convince skeptical European officials at the Munich Security Conference that America, the largest and most powerful military force in the world, in combination with all of the European Union and NATO nations, doesn’t have the ability to produce enough weapons to help Ukraine hold off Putin’s Russia, which has an economy the size of Italy’s and is currently begging for discount missiles and drones from Iran and North Korea.

When Vance said, “The West doesn’t make enough munitions to support an indefinite war,” it’s a safe bet they were popping champagne in the Kremlin, just like they did that night in 2016 when Trump was declared president after a multi-million-dollar Russian investment in social media on his behalf. At least now Vance will definitely be able to count on continuing support from Russian and Chinese social media trolls.

His next stop was Face The Nation where, last week, he engaged in this made-for-Russian-television exchange with CBS’s Margaret Brennan (the actual dialogue is more lengthy; I’ve quoted its summary here from the Biden campaign):

Brennan: “Viktor Orbán seized control of universities and put them in foundations that were run by his allies. He rewrote the Constitution, he neutered the courts, and he has tried to control the media. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?

Vance: “I think he’s made smart decisions that we could learn from in the United States.”

The watershed moment in American history that led to this was when five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United (and three other decisions) that bribing US politicians is no longer bribery or political corruption but, instead, is merely “First Amendment-protected free speech.” 

The cash that rightwing billionaires, foreign governments, and corporations are stuffing into corrupt politicians’ pockets isn’t “money,” the rightwing majority on the Court ruled: it’s First Amendment protected “free speech.”  Those corporations aren’t (to paraphrase John Marshall) lifeless, soulless creations of the law: they are, Republicans on the Court said, “persons” with a constitutional right to free speech.

All this made us ripe for the picking by foreign governments that see the very ongoing existence of American democracy as a threat to the legitimacy of their own oligarchies.

To the point of Vance and Greene, Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, warned us that his five conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court had not only thrown the door open to American billionaires and corporations corrupting our politicians and political process: they also, he wrote, rolled out the welcome mat to foreign governments.

“If taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions.

“Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”

“Tokyo Rose,” of course, was the infamous Japanese intelligence officer who was constantly on the radio listened to by US solders in the Pacific theater during WWII, telling our people in uniform that the war was lost, Japan would win, and they should just go home. Her broadcasts — much like Trump’s and Vance’s modern day proclamations — were designed to destroy our sense of national resolve and solidarity.

“More pertinently,” Stevens added in the next sentence of his dissent, “it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans…”

All foreign governments or corporations have to do is set up a subsidy corporation in the United States to pour money into our political process. Opensecrets.org documents how millions in foreign money is now sloshing around in the coffers of American politicians.

Thus, today, one part of that work of ending American democracy is being done in the US by Orbán’s Hungarian oligarchs and his government, shoveling money into US lobbying and influence operations in ways legalized by Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote. Along with dozens of other governments.

Documents obtained by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) found that Orbán hired a lobbying firm and a PR company, both started by former Florida Republican Congressman Connie Mack IV, to promote his image to reporters and politicians in the US. He also, GPAHE noted, hired another GOP-aligned lobbying firm to hook up Tucker Carlson with Orbán and Hungary.

To date, Orbán has spent millions in America purchasing good will with US politicians and media figures, as revealed by The New York Times in an article titled “Hungary’s Leader Fights Criticism in U.S. via Vast Influence Campaign.”

And, of course, it’s not just Orbán who’s flooding the US with money and influence campaigns to discredit democracy and promote authoritarianism. The US example of democracy is a major threat to every iron-fisted regime in the world, and increasingly they’re finding common cause to tear us down and remove that hazard.

From the French Revolution in 1789 to the people’s uprising in Beijing in 1989, people around the world have used language and icons from the pens of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and their peers.

On May 29th, 1989, over twenty thousand people gathered around a 37-foot-tall papier-mâché statue in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. They placed their lives in danger, but that statue was such a powerful archetypal representation that many were willing to die for it…and some did. They called their statue the “Goddess of Democracy”: it was a scale replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in New York harbor on Liberty Island.

China will never again tolerate such an eruption of democracy on their soil and, having recently taken down democracy in Hong Kong, appear to be planning to extinguish the troublesome democratic example of nearby (and ethnically Chinese) Taiwan.

The tip of their spear in the US is TikTok, where pro-Trump posts, perhaps boosted by their algorithm the way some believe they are on X and Facebook, outnumber pro-Biden posts by two-to-one.

Since January 2023 on TikTok, hashtag #Trump2024 has received 427.8 million likes compared with 50.9 million likes for #Biden2024. They’re currently running a massive TV campaign promoting the site without disclosing its connection to the Chinese Communist Party.

These authoritarian regimes are definitely coming after democracies: from their point of view, this is war.

Right now a major corruption scandal is sweeping Europe, as politicians and media figures from more than a half-dozen countries have been busted for taking money from Russia in exchange for parroting Putin’s lines about Ukraine, publishing articles written by Russian intelligence operatives over their own bylines, and even introducing anti-Ukraine legislation written by Russian agents.

As Alex Finley wrote a month ago for The New Republic:

“It is naïve to think the same pattern does not exist in the United States, given the ample evidence of coordinated pro-Russian talking points from several Republican politicians. Just this week, Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke to Steve Bannon about Ukraine’s persecution of Christians, which is a Kremlin talking point aimed at boosting the pro-Moscow wing of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church.

“The U.S. should be spending money on the border with Mexico, not on Ukraine aid? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Russia invaded Ukraine to defend itself against an expanding NATO? That’s a Kremlin talking point. Call for a cease-fire, and give Russia Crimea and eastern Ukraine? That’s a Kremlin talking point.”

How much money or back-channel support are Greene, Trump, and Vance (among about 150 other Republicans) getting from Putin, Orbán or Xi? Nobody knows.

The problem, of course, is that Citizens United allows Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, and other foreign influence campaigns targeting US democracy to remain impossible to track down amidst the ocean of dark money flooding the US political system, legalized by Citizens United. Tokyo Rose, it turns out, was a piker.

When Thomas and Alito voted for Citizens United, they may have thought Stevens’ concerns were overblown; they just didn’t want the billionaire gravy train they were fully legalizing for themselves and Republican politicians nationwide to stop.

But now their twin doctrines of corporate personhood and money-as-speech have metastasized so extensively they threaten to kill their host, ending democracy here and turning America into another Putin- or Orbán-style autocracy run by Hitler-wannabee Donald Trump.

After Trump took millions from foreign governments while in the White House, Democrats this week introduced legislation to go around the Supreme Court and specifically outlaw presidents from taking such foreign bribes. Citizens United is why Trump felt comfortable asking fossil fuel executives representing several foreign based corporations for a $1 billion bribe.

Citizens United is no longer just a matter of political corruption; it’s a national security issue as well.

Which is why Congress must, as soon as Democrats regain control of that body, reverse it and allow the reinstatement of the hundreds of federal and state good-government laws which that decision overturned.  

Pass it on.