The American System Works, and It Will Work If Trump Wins Again

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, December 15, 2023

 

I want to endorse Jim Geraghty’s rejection of the idea that, if Donald Trump wins a second term next year, he is likely to become a dictator. He is not, and concluding as much does not in any way constitute an endorsement of the man or of his many flaws.

 

I do not think that Donald Trump should be president again. If he is the Republican nominee — which he should not be — I will not vote for him. In my view, Trump should have been disqualified from consideration by Congress in 2021, after he attempted to rewrite the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act to help him stay in power illegitimately. This behavior represented an unforgivable abrogation of his oath of office, and it ought to have made him permanently toxic to voters. Irrespective of their capacity to follow through on their promises, we should not put people who vow to violate the law into the White House. Trump frequently muses about violating the law. A sober electorate would decline to give him the opportunity.

 

As Jim notes, though, it does not follow from this that Trump has a realistic chance of becoming a dictator. Despite the best efforts of the progressive movement over the last century, we still have the vast majority of our checks and balances in place — and they work. Back in 2016, when Trump first won, I was asked whether I was worried that he was going to end the American republic, and my immediate answer was “no.” It’s “no” now, too. Taking issue with Liz Cheney’s hyperbole, Jim suggests that there are very few people who argue that “the country is ‘invulnerable’ to any attempted illegal or unconstitutional acts on the part of a president.” He’s right, of course: Sometimes, presidents do get away with committing “illegal or unconstitutional acts.” But there is a massive difference between a president getting away with a series of illegal or unconstitutional acts — even terrible ones — and a president becoming a dictator. Even Woodrow Wilson — a man who wanted to be a dictator, and who used the First World War to get as close to that state as he could — did not achieve this. Why not? Because the system really is that good.

 

As the election approaches, we are going to see a concerted attempt to pretend that the two arguments I’ve made above are logically incompatible. But they aren’t. It is entirely possible to believe that Trump should not be president because he wants to act in a manner that is inconsistent with our Constitution, but that, if he does become president, he will fail to escape the system’s core constraints. To make this case is not to “defend Trump,” but to profess confidence in the American model of government against those who would undermine it. We have already seen this work, back in 2021, when Trump tried to stay in office despite having lost the election. That he tried was a disgrace. That he failed spectacularly was a testament to the strength of our founding documents, the habits of our people, and the enduring relevance of the observation that the best way of checking ambition is with ambition itself.