Dictatorship

The threat is real

Photo Credit: Alon Skuy / Stringer

Something important is happening in the conversation and coverage around the 2024 presidential campaign — and not a moment too soon. We’re hearing a lot more about the “D Word”: dictatorship. 

Instead of only the usual fare one would expect six weeks before the Iowa caucuses — the latest polling, endorsement counting, comparisons of cash on hand — there is mounting attention to what a second Trump presidency would look like. He is, after all, running away with the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But that’s not all; what he is now proclaiming, proudly and publicly in speeches and online posts, would mean the end of American democracy.

A system of checks and balances is built into our way of government by the Constitution. Let us see clearly that what Trump is promising is to demolish as much of that as he can — in short, a version of one-man rule.

When Trump was first running for president, many journalists were loath to call his lies what they were — lies — because that word felt too loaded. But his tsunami of falsehoods changed that. Lies are, after all, lies.

Similarly, there was a time when the press cast aside words like fascism, authoritarianism, and, yes, dictatorship, as hyperbole. Some are still reluctant to enumerate the danger so explicitly, but considering the violent coup attempt in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat and the vision he is promising if reelected, terrifying, formerly remote possibilities suddenly loom with greater likelihood. And it is imperative that they are articulated.

Conservative scholar and Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, who left the Republican Party in 2016 over Donald Trump, recently wrote a must-read piece with a title that dispenses with subtlety: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan walks through all that we have seen since Trump first ran for president: the breaking of norms, the acquiescence of the Republican Party, Trump’s promise to prosecute his enemies, and his increasingly chilling rhetoric. 

Kagan focuses on a moment from last month: 

We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

And goes on to say:

If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship. 

Kagan isn’t alone. Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who also broke with her party over Trump and was subsequently cast out, recently told CBS News, “One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.” There’s that “D Word” again. 

Kagan’s and Cheney’s warnings were recently included as evidence of Trump’s authoritarian and fascist rhetoric in another Washington Post piece: “The fear of a looming Trump dictatorship.” Columnist Ishaan Tharoor, citing Post reporting, writes:

As my colleagues have reported over the past year, Trump has made clear his stark, authoritarian vision for a potential second term. He would embark on a wholesale purge of the federal bureaucracy, weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents (something he claims is being done to him), stack government agencies across the board with political appointees prescreened as ideological Trump loyalists, and dole out pardons to myriad officials and apparatchiks as incentives to do his bidding or stay loyal. 

The New York Times published an article today with the understated headline, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First.” The article itself did not mince words:

Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.

As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.

The dangers are real, very real. And that’s why it is essential that they are called out, forcefully, consistently, and with a full accounting of what’s at stake. Trump cannot be treated as just another candidate for office. The challenges of the world, as complex, confounding, demoralizing, and difficult as they are, should not minimize the challenges we face to the very survival of American democratic governance. 

Polls show Biden is vulnerable. Many Americans feel dissatisfaction over inflation, interest rates, and international affairs, such as the war in Gaza. There is concern over crime, immigration, and all the usual issues that dominate our elections. Those topics should be covered, and Biden and his administration should be held to account for their policies. But reporters should be fair and acknowledge how difficult these matters are. 

Because Trump promises simplicity. He speaks in the equivalent of ALL CAPS. It’s boastful, empty rhetoric that rails against problems without offering any sense of how to fix them, other than his being allowed to rule the nation without constraint. We already know what that would mean. It was why he was rejected in 2020 and why the candidates he supported fared poorly in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections. 

A majority of Americans don’t want what Trump is promising. They don’t want a dictatorship. The more America understands the possibility of that grim prospect, the less of a chance that we will find ourselves confronting it. We should not minimize the threat, but we should also recognize that it can be defeated — and in a convincing way that would strengthen our nation after a dangerous era. That’s why it’s so important to call it what it is. And it is heartening to see that begin to happen.

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