If Democrats are actually sincere in worrying that the United States of America is one election away from dictatorship, there are ways to show this.
Allow me to add my two cents to the burgeoning literature on whether we should have serious concern that Donald Trump, if elected again in 2024, would become a dictator. Michael, Jim, and Charlie have already made many fine points about the often-impotent nature of Trump’s first-term efforts, the strength of the American system of checks and balances, and the strength as well of institutional opposition to Trump — which combined with those formal checks and balances to produce precisely that impotence.
First, the fact that we are even having this discussion is yet another reminder of the stark raving insanity of renominating Trump. I hate to have to keep repeating that in every single discussion of the American political situation, but everything else in our politics and policy is downstream of that decision. There is nothing — zip, zero, zilch, nada — stopping Republican primary voters from making a choice other than Trump. No votes have been cast yet, no delegates selected. Unlike on the Democratic side, where voters aren’t really being offered an alternative to Joe Biden, there are two plausible alternatives in Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. And if DeSantis or Haley is the nominee, there will be no serious discussion by serious people about their ending the American constitutional order. Oh, sure, Democrats and their flunkies in the press and pundit world will compare the nominee to Adolf Hitler no matter who it is — Harry Truman compared Tom Dewey to Hitler while there were still Nazis being tried at Nuremberg — but American voters mostly tend to write this sort of thing off as just rhetoric.
Whereas with Trump, we get things like his calling for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” or telling Sean Hannity, when asked if he’d abuse power, he wouldn’t do so “except for Day One. . . . No, no, no, other than Day One. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.” Combine that sort of rhetoric with his long-standing cynicism about law, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the resulting riot at the Capitol, his habit of praising foreign dictators, his malign ability to get Republicans to profess things they obviously never believed in before, his obsession with score-settling over his criminal prosecutions and civil legal woes, and the fact that another Trump term would be unconstrained from the start by any prospect of facing the voters again, and you see why it is that not-crazy people have not-crazy worries concerned about how far he would go.
It is political malpractice of the highest order to allow this to be a major liability for the Republican Party in an extremely winnable general election. And it is especially idiotic to give the modern Democratic Party, of all people, any sort of moral high ground on matters such as constitutionalism, respect for law, and acknowledgement of the legitimacy of elections.
Second, we can’t really discuss whether Trump is any sort of threat to be a dictator without defining what we mean by “dictator.” Do we mean a president who would try to cut the other branches and levels of government out of the picture so he could rule by his own fiat, while calling their legitimacy into question? A president who would cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results he doesn’t like, and criminally prosecute political opponents while trying to cover up criminality by his own family? Who threatens the courts with dilution of their powers and attacks on their legitimacy if they don’t rule his way? Who threatens to breach long-standing legislative rules he once described as bulwarks against corrupt tyranny, in order to rewrite the voting system to favor his party? Who discards constitutional restraints on his office in order to issue sweeping executive fiats affecting the everyday lives of Americans, based on the flimsiest fig leaf of prior authorization in law, in order to bypass Congress in ways it disapproves? Who does so even while all but admitting that he has no power to do so, is contradicting his own prior statements about the law, and is openly acknowledging that he’s defying prior court rulings and just buying time? As you are probably aware, that’s the president we already have. So, the bar for alarm has to be higher than just “the status quo, but against different targets.”
The odds of Trump’s totally abolishing the Constitution and making himself some sort of ruler-for-life who never faces another election seem pretty distant to me, even after January 6 — an event that was followed by Trump’s meekly slinking out of town at the constitutionally appointed hour two weeks later. That said, there is a lot of damage that can be done to our system — especially to the unwritten norms of behavior that prevent every controversy from boiling into an immediate test of the limits of power — simply by having a man of bad character in the Oval Office who feels he has little left to lose. The first Trump term was bad for Republicans and conservatives in terms of their respect for all of that, in particular their regard for playing by the rules and respecting the outcomes of elections — especially in the model it set for younger people to think about what it even means to be a Republican or a conservative. It was arguably even worse for Democrats, liberals, and progressives, who began Trump’s term by violent protests on Inauguration Day and efforts to sabotage the capacity of the winner of the election to govern with a cooked-up investigation, and ended it with two impeachments, the suppression of newspaper journalism, widespread changes in election laws, and a still-ongoing series of dubious prosecutions. All of this is bound to get worse on both sides if we have another Trump term — or another Trump general-election loss, for that matter — and that gets us, bit by bit, closer to losing the panoply of legal, institutional, and cultural bulwarks that have thus far prevented a more immediate slide down the anthill from a constitutional republic.
Third, we have been fortunate thus far, and we will likely remain fortunate, but less so. Trump was externally constrained in his first term by the need to seek reelection, by the American constitutional system, and by the many people in positions of independent power or within his administration who refused to go along when he pressed for genuinely improper steps. He was internally constrained by his lack of knowledge of the system, by his laziness and indiscipline, and by the resulting ineptitude of his plans. Trump himself was incapable of plotting anything that would work. Look at what happened after the 2020 election, when he devised a plan that not a single court or legislature anywhere in the country, or either house of Congress, or his own vice president, would follow. He’s 77 now, and not getting more focused.
Frankly, he was also internally constrained by the simple fact that he has lived his whole life in America. Trump undoubtedly has the elements of the dictatorial personality: the resistance to the constraints of law, the cynicism about rules, the inability to ever admit error or defeat, and the need to construct an entire fabricated reality around things he’s said or done rather than admit that they were bad decisions that didn’t work. And he does like to praise foreign dictators, not just to return their flattery but also because he’s spent his whole adult life running things with few constraints and envies that. But even his imagination about what is possible is constrained by being an American who pays lip service to the Constitution and elections and our founding ideals. That matters.
When push comes to shove, it also matters that the men with guns won’t follow his orders beyond a certain point. It would be terrifying to reach the stage at which we’d have to depend for the survival of our republic on the military or law enforcement defying the elected civilian leadership — doing so is a coup of its own — but there really is no reason to think that they’d cross a Rubicon for Trump, especially not given the leftward tilt of the military brass these days.
Fourth, if Democrats are actually sincere in worrying that the United States of America is one election away from dictatorship, there are ways to show this. They can join with Republicans in Congress to pass legislation restricting the unilateral powers of the executive branch to make domestic policy by presidential fiat and agency rule and statement. They can make even more explicit that presidents cannot spend money building things, issue new federal debt, or release debts to the government without going through Congress. They can restrict federal involvement in elections, protecting the decentralization of federal elections outside of Washington. They can pass the proposed “Keep Nine” constitutional amendment to ensure that a president with dictatorial ambitions can’t pack the Supreme Court with pliable cronies. They can repeal elastic and open-ended federal criminal statutes and place more restrictions on the FBI and federal prosecutors in pursuing the president’s political enemies. Of course, Democrats want to do none of this, because they want all of those powers for themselves.
But if they decide that they don’t want any president to wield powers perilous to liberty, I can only say: Welcome to the party, pal.