Trump may want to be a dictator, but he'd be the GOP's dictator
Trump may want to be a dictator, but he'd be the GOP's dictator
While recent warnings about Trump's authoritarian ambitions are a positive development, Democrats also need to confront the reactionary social movement that empowers him
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
In recent months, there’s been an efflorescence of think pieces and news articles addressing the severe dangers should Donald Trump manage to return to the Oval Office. While many observers have long warned of the continuing danger posed by the former president, this recent batch has appeared in more mainstream sources like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic magazine. This broader awakening is a cause for celebration — not because such warnings are a silver bullet bound to stop Trump, but because they hold the promise that both the voting public and the Democratic Party may be snapped out of any complacency in the face of the greatest constitutional threat since the Civil War. In this, the former president seems unexpectedly willing to help paint himself as a crazy extremist; as one observer noted after Trump tried to take ownership of the “dictator” label leveled at him, “The word ‘dictator’ is not likely to land well with the median swing voter who is disengaged from politics but will not be able to miss this characterization next year—with the accompanying sound bites to prove it.”
Yet there’s an enormous difference between sounding the alarm about Trump’s return to the presidency, and articulating strategies to make sure it doesn’t come to pass — the first without the second carries the risk of raising panic and disarray rather than action, granting agency to Trump while withholding it from the American majority that opposes him. Likewise, it’s important to get the warnings themselves right, and make sure the discussion encompasses not only Donald Trump but the larger reactionary movement of which he’s become the figurehead.
First, though, I want to praise and amplify the many good points that are made in recent articles. One particular strength is the way that various authors have sketched out, in nightmarishly credible detail, the means by which a re-elected Trump could use his administration to disassemble the rule of law without a great deal of trouble. The standout of these recent tocsin essays is Robert Kagan’s editorial in the Washington Post about the U.S.’s path towards Trumpian dictatorship. Kagan provides two invaluable services: he illustrates the powerful factors that make Trump’s victory in a third presidential election entirely plausible, and provides an airtight case as to the authoritarian nature of a second Trump stint in the Oval Office.
Kagan traces the factors running in the former president’s favor, including: his current dominant position in the primaries; the extreme likelihood that the GOP will coalesce around his candidacy; fractures in the Dem coalition and the presence of third-party candidates who might well siphon votes from Joe Biden; Trump’s sheen of credibility as a former president; a powerful right-wing media apparatus; a sour national mood; voter concerns about Biden’s advanced age; and Trump’s pose as an outsider who can cut through the logjams of the American political system. It’s a thorough and gut-punching list.
But Kagan saves his most savage accounting for what he sees as the likely nature of a second Trump presidency: nasty, brutish, and not at all short. With presidential powers pushed beyond their constitutional limits, Trump’s desire for retribution against his perceived enemies would explode, abetted by his ability to defy and corrupt the justice system, replace bureaucrats with right-wing lackeys, and conscript the military into violently suppressing domestic dissent. As for the rest of the citizenry, Kagan takes a dim view of their reaction to a nation where the law might be distorted in such a way:
The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.
An even more exhaustive package of Trump warnings arrived in the form of an entire issue of The Atlantic, in which individual authors detail the inevitable corruption, anti-immigrant extremism, unfettered misogyny, and subversion of the rule of law in a second Trump term. And an overview by David Frum provides a complementary perspective to that of Kagan, with Frum writing that it “would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War [. . .] [T]he government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.” In other words, if Trump’s need for retribution somehow didn’t push him into lawlessness, his need to escape his own criminality, and to continue it unmolested, would drive the country towards dictatorship.
But as one looks at the various angles of a second Trump presidency that the Atlantic writers anticipate, a subtle but crucial distinction can be discerned — the awful things that Trump would do out of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, and the awful things that Trump would do that are. . . actually broadly-held Republican and right-wing priorities. Indeed, Kagan, Frum, and others make clear that the glue holding Trump’s schemes together would be the expected complicity and complaisance of the Republican Party, which would render congressional opposition a dead letter.
Sure, when we speak of Trump’s financial corruption, perhaps the desire of other GOP politicians to share in the loot would be a major motivator of their support. Widening the aperture, though, we can grasp that, no matter his personal inclinations towards dictatorship, a second Trump presidency would likely incorporate vast swaths of GOP doctrine and goals with which Trump is simpatico. For example — Trump is a misogynist, and his mere presence in the Oval Office would have hugely malign effects for women across the nation. But at least equal to his moral enablement of abusers and misogynists everywhere would be his ability to appoint conservative GOP judges who oppose abortion rights and bureaucrats who oppose all manner of equal rights for women — actions not simply reflecting Trump’s bad character, but the anti-female ideology of the Republican right and of the MAGA base that is driving his candidacy.
This points to a more holistic and ultimately more helpful way of talking about, and warning about, the threat of Donald Trump. The GOP is not just randomly adhered to him through foolishness and cowardice — though many of the party’s politicos are in fact fools and cowards — but because in significant ways he would be doing what the Republican Party actually wants. This includes the implementation of radical anti-immigration measures; moves to impose Christianity as the de facto state religion; a desire to undermine and reverse hard-fought rights for women and sexual minorities; and an effort to promote white supremacy by eroding the civil rights and equality of minority Americans.
Likewise, we can see that even the more general threats embodied by Trump are hardly his goals alone. What is Trump’s threat to elections and democracy but a more exaggerated and personalized version of what the GOP has already done in state after state, where it has gerrymandered itself into permanent majorities? Aren’t we talking not just about the end of democracy, but more specifically about the imposition of one-party rule by the Republican Party? Similarly, it is not entirely accurate to say that Trump would destroy the rule of law, so much as that he’d twist its application to favor not just himself but men, whites, and Christians. And to be clear, it’s not only the Republican Party’s interests Trump would represent, but the whole reactionary base that’s now driving the Trumpist GOP — a base motivated to a great extent by “anxiety that White, Christian preeminence is under threat from outsiders of different ethnic groups and creeds,” as CNN columnist Stephen Collinson neatly puts it.
Apart from the ideal of accuracy, why is it important to acknowledge the way that Trump is no rogue actor, but the embodiment of a reactionary movement that encompasses almost his entire political party and tens of millions of Americans? Isn’t Trump’s malevolent presence on the national stage persuasively bad enough on its own? Why muddy a clear message about an obviously degenerate politician (“he wants to be a dictator”) in favor of one that’s harder to encapsulate (“the United States faces a de facto insurrection by a reactionary crowd of white supremacists and Christian nationalists, led by the uniquely awful Donald Trump”)? Why shouldn’t the Democrats just make Trump, rather than Trump and the radicalized GOP (including both its politicians and its base), the focus of their 2024 campaign?
As strong as they are, Kagan’s and Frum’s essays provide some clues as to why skimping on this broader context ultimately hurts the defense of American democracy and the effort to defeat Trump. Notably, they both take for granted the abject surrender and spinelessness of the modern GOP to Trump — a sound assumption — yet neither fully addresses the obvious consonance between Trump’s apparent goals and those of the GOP. In Kagan’s piece, there’s a glaring omission when he talks of Trump targeting his political enemies and effectively cowing the rest of American through example. It seems far more likely that Trump would help unleash a tidal wave of oppression — both legal and violent — against particular hated groups, such as African-Americans, gays, and women, not against the American public more generally.
But I think this level of specificity would run contrary to Kagan’s wish to issue a clarion call about Trump that keeps the focus on Trump and brings in potential allies, particularly on the right, who might be put off by talk of how the former president is a specific threat to non-whites and other groups. The hope that the tide may be turned by conservatives is confirmed in Kagan’s follow-up essay, in which he identifies strategies for stopping Trump — strategies that, in my humble opinion, place an awful lot of faith in members of the GOP breaking with him. As I already said, most GOP politicians don’t back Trump because they fear him — they back him because they agree with him. You can see this reflected in the words uttered by more than one Republican that it would be better to elect Trump than Biden, because they ultimately consider the Democrats a greater threat to the country — which, roughly translated, means that they’d rather have a violent-minded dictator who supports white supremacist and Christian nationalist values than a pro-democracy president whose re-election would mean the continued advance of a more egalitarian America (in terms of race, gender, and sexual identity).
For the American majority that opposes Trump — a heterogeneous group that encompasses America’s diversity of all kinds — the risk in overly concentrating the 2024 Democratic campaign on a vaguer “Trump is a dictator in waiting” line is that it appeals mainly to this majority’s idealism, when the Democrats really also need to appeal even more to their self-interest. And to appeal to their self-interest, not only do they have to remind people that democracy sustains their rights — they need to make clear how Trump represents a powerful minority of Americans who hate gays, believe women should be forced to deliver the babies of their rapists, think Latinos and African-Americans should be treated as second-class citizens, and are totally fine with banning Muslims from coming to the U.S. and coercing fellow Americans into praying to their Christian god.
In other words, they need to be reminded not simply that they should fear Trump, but that they should loathe and oppose the whole rotten movement behind him that seeks to move America back to the 19th century, not further forward into the 21st. The Democratic campaign must seek not only to gain their votes, but to mobilize them as an active movement that opposes, tooth and claw, what amounts to a white nationalist, far-right Christian insurrection against not just American democracy, but against our modern society itself.
The problem is not that the connections between Trump and this vast reactionary project are hidden — they’re very much in plain view. Rather, the problem is one of emphasis, particularly by the Democratic Party. I will put this as bluntly as I can: to the degree the Democratic Party fails to fully identify the threat of this broader reactionary movement — one that seeks to do harm to specific constituents of the Democratic Party — they are failing their voters and failing America. To the degree the Democratic Party fails to alert the American majority to not just what Trump has in store for them, but what his thousands of political allies and millions of fervid supporters intend — they are failing their voters and failing America. To the degree the Democratic Party refuses to mobilize the American majority due to fears of creating unnecessary conflict in society — conflict that the GOP and the right have self-servingly stoked non-stop for many decades — they are failing their voters and failing America.
Trump’s best chance of election is to mobilize his own supporters with his increasingly fascistic and white power rhetoric, while the majority that opposes him is lulled into complacency by the lie that he doesn’t mean what he says, that he’s just an entertaining guy who speaks off the cuff who maybe deserves a second chance after the anxiety-filled Biden years. This is the danger of overly personalizing the race and making it too much about just Trump. Trump can try to hide his true intentions behind smokescreens of lies, and in fact is already enacting his usual defenses, appropriating the accusations made against him, and either flinging them back at his opponents, or trying to make them into a joke; but it’s a lot harder to hide an entire right-wing movement hellbent on returning America to the days when men were men, women were women, and minorities knew their place.
The evidence for this movement can be found everywhere that the GOP has gained full governmental control — from Texas, where draconian anti-abortion laws mean that even women with a desperate medical need for the procedure must flee like criminals to other states that permit it, to Florida, which is targeting gay teachers and students, to the widespread extreme gerrymanders in state after state that deny fair representation to millions upon millions of Democratic-leaning voters.
Decent Americans shouldn’t be scared of Trump; they should be absolutely furious at the retrograde presumption of this whole violent-minded movement of which he is the obscene and discredited face. Likewise, no American casting a vote for Trump in 2024 should be able to claim ignorance of the hatred, violence, social destabilization, and wrecking-ball-to-democracy that they would thus endorse. Unlike in 2016 and 2020, the goals of Democrats must include making crystal clear the full stakes of the election, so that no American can bury their head in the sand.
But Democrats can’t just think about beating Trump in 2024; they need to think about rolling back, delegitimizing, and defeating for good an agglomeration of religious extremists, white supremacists, and anti-gay bigots that keeps on sabotaging American governance and society. It is beyond absurd that the forces of democracy and equality should behave as if they are on the defensive, even as we rightly acknowledge the virulence and extreme danger of the right-wing counterrevolution behind Trump. Every day that the Democrats are not talking about GOP extremism and pressing Trump and his allies to defend their indefensible positions is a day that they are conducting themselves like political losers. As Josh Marshall rightly notes in a recent piece advocating for a politics of Democratic initiative, expressing outrage at what Trump does ultimately accomplishes nothing — what counts is going on offense (his example of Biden’s need to propose a bill codifying abortion rights should he be re-elected is spot on). And I would add that going on offense also involves articulating and moving forward values supported by the American majority that opposes Trump and the radicalized GOP.
In turn, speaking and acting in ways that move the American majority to outrage and action is essential to winning this political battle — because this fight is not just against Trump, or GOP politicians, but against a whole political-social movement consisting of thousands of daily offenses and aggressions. Americans need to be reminded of how proud they should be about the advances we’ve all made towards greater equality and democracy that enable all a greater opportunity to thrive — and how these advances are threatened not just by Trump, but by a whole army of people who would deny them their basic rights, not to mention their basic humanity. In their workplaces, in their relationships, in their places of worship, Americans need to bear the light of this awareness, and push individually and in solidarity for a more just nation. It is far past time to rouse and rile the American majority to its own defense, and to send an unambiguous message that no rule but democratic rule will ever be accepted as legitimate in the United States.