Chronicle of a dictatorship foretold
Part of the unreality of the lawless first 100 days of Trump II is how unsurprising it has all been, given that his first term ended with an actual armed insurrection
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
As we pass the 100-day mark of Trump II, I am driven to note — for my own peace of mind, for some spectral historical record, for the possibility that it may resonate with some readers — how terribly predictable this century of days has been. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform that made it clear to all who were willing to listen that he would rule in a lawless, violent manner. He talked about retribution against anyone who had ever tried to hold him to account, from politicians and reporters to government servants; he and his allies lied that the United States was being invaded by immigrants and that all manner of cruelty was justified in repelling them; he literally vowed to rule like a dictator.
Additionally, his first term had demonstrated his complete and unalterable obsession with his narrow personal interests, as opposed to anything resembling the public good — the most catastrophic example being his willingness to cause excess deaths in the hundreds of thousands because he thought that sounding the alarm on covid and taking appropriate precautions would hurt his re-election chances.
More than this, though: Trump’s 2024 campaign and his many declarations of war against democracy and the rule of law were themselves rooted not simply in his first presidency and a desire for re-election, but very much grew out of his January 6 insurrection and related illegal efforts to overthrow the 2024 election results and our democratic order. After all, he spent the last four years both in fear of being punished for his crimes against the nation, and doing everything he could to subvert our politics and our justice system to prevent being brought to justice. Perhaps most notably, he pressured most GOP elected official to accept the Big Lie that Trump had actually won in 2024; that Democrats had stolen the election through suborning millions of illegal immigrants to cast votes; and that January 6 was not an insurrection but a completely legal and justified effort to make good his claim on the presidency. In other words, he didn’t run a campaign so much as continue his insurrection, with the goal not to govern as a president, but to rule like a king, to transform the Oval Office into an anvil against which he could smite his enemies while corruptly hoovering up billions of dollars from corrupt dealings.
In short, prior to his election last November, Donald Trump could not have made it any clearer that he was an unrepentant enemy of the United States, that he would not hesitate to act illegally to maximize his personal power over the federal government, and that undermining and destroying the rule of law was essential to his vision for America.
Flash forward three months and change from his inauguration, and the pace of his attack on America democracy and freedoms has been as frenzied as it has been wholly predictable. Out the gate, he pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists, thereby endorsing their criminality and insurrectionary spirit as his own, and unleashed the Department of Justice to drum up false charges against those he considers his enemies. He has blackmailed leading law firms into committing to the MAGA cause, and leading universities into complicity with a right-wing cultural purge. The DOGE initiative led by Elon Musk has wrecked vast segments of the federal government that had been put in place on behalf of the American people by previous democratically-elected governments. In doing so, Trump has decimated much of what the citizenry had built for itself to advance the common good, from a Department of Education that helped children otherwise left behind by their local school systems, to the capacity to serve veterans who have protected our country, to medical research and institutions that safeguard the public health. There are literally hundreds, even thousands, more examples of his assault on the country we have all collectively built.
Donald Trump has treated immigrants, legal and undocumented alike, as if they were actual enemies of America; crucially, he has denied them due process rights in a way that directly threatens the rights of every American citizen against arbitrary punishment by the government, so that his war on immigrants has become inseparable from a larger war on the rights of Americans. Abroad, he has set about wrecking our NATO alliance while taking the side of Russia in its genocidal war against Ukraine. He has alienated Canada, arguably our closest ally, by deranged talk of annexing that country and making it the 51st state. He has threatened our collective and individual wealth by implementing a chaotic, extremist tariff regime that has severely undermined the world’s faith in the U.S.’s role atop the world financial system and raised the prospect of recession, if not a far more dangerous destabilization of the world economy.
Perversely, within weeks of his election, business leaders, attorneys, university chancellors, major media, and other influential members of civil society directly in the line of fire of Trump’s authoritarian onslaught began to exhibit a strange and sinister disposition. Rather than calling out the utter predictability of Trump’s actions and condemning them as a breach of his pledge to uphold the Constitution — the insane executive orders, the mass pardon of insurrectionists, the destruction of U.S. security by siding with Russia against Ukraine and our European allies — they instead began endorsing the supposed inevitability of Trump’s successful seizure of illicit power. They began to behave as if he were already more of a dictator than a president, that such a state of affairs was simply to be endured, and that they (and by extension, the rest of us) had best accommodate themselves to this new reality. They both tacitly acknowledged the primary lesson of the last several years — that Trump is a man who wants to be a dictator and will try to be a dictator — and skipped right ahead to assenting to Trump being a dictator.
If you wanted to be extremely charitable, you could say that a desire to protect what they had, avoid provoking Trump, and batten down in the hope of better times motivated the collaborationist spirit (M. Gessen has an insightful column, drawing from their experience of the Putin regime in Russia, of what motivates people to go along with a corrupt government). But no such charity should be extended to those in the Democratic Party who not only counseled accommodation, but talked about the U.S.’s alleged hard shift to the right, and about a non-existent massive defeat for the Democrats, as if everything the party stood for had been fully rejected by the American people. Incredibly, some even argued that the Democrats had spent too much time emphasizing the defense of democracy and demonizing Donald Trump’s authoritarian aims, when in reality the only failure in this regard was the failure to make concrete for the American people how much they stood to lose — in terms of freedoms, in terms of material wealth, in terms of personal security — if a confirmed insurrectionist like Trump were to assume the Oval Office.
It was jaw-dropping for high-ranking Democrats to view the victory of a man who literally tried to overthrow the U.S. government — including by the incitement of a violent mob whose members likely would have killed many of said Democrats had they been able — as a time for compromise rather than unbending resistance to the lawless regime that was so obviously about to erupt. The horror of such political misjudgment registers even more powerfully today, when Trump has for a hundred days acted exactly like that man who tried to overturn the election results more than four years ago, and whose goal is clearly to attain dictatorial power over the American government.
But while many of our elites have failed us miserably, ordinary Americans have not been nearly so quick to accept Trump’s misrule as normal. Recent public opinion polls that show sharply declining support for Donald Trump — including in the areas of immigration and the economy, which have arguably previously helped provide a floor to his popularity — are deeply heartening, particularly so early in his administration and in the face of so much elite-level surrender. While I would not go so far as to say that Americans have collectively awakened to the full scope of his authoritarian ambitions, I would say that they are starting to notice and object to their consequences.
The more that Americans can see the through-line between the reality of Trump’s first term, his insurrectionary time out of office, and his return to the White House to seal the authoritarian deal, the faster and more effectively will they be able to organize and act to counter him. We are not starting from zero here; we can look at Trump’s history to grasp how much danger we’re in; we are under no obligation to give him the benefit of the doubt, or a second chance. Trump tried to overthrow our democracy and the rule of law four years ago; unchanged and now unchained, he has returned to office to finish the job.