Can Trump Be a Dictator If He Needs to Fail?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 04, 2023

 

Donald Trump has enjoyed a consistent lead over Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2020 election rematch for the better part of three months, which seems to be the amount of time necessary to convince Washington-based political observers that the trend is real. All of a sudden, a burst of apocalyptic warnings about a second Trump term has overtaken the political discourse.

 

Washington Post editor at large Robert Kagan led the charge last week with a column that has “Washington buzzing,” according to New York Times reporter Peter Baker. It’s well past the point at which the civically minded public should stop indulging the “self-delusion” that an alternative to Trump will win the Republican nomination, Kagan wrote in the piece warning of the “inevitable” coming of the “Trump dictatorship.”

 

Trump will win his party’s nod, Kagan predicted, and the GOP will fall in line behind him. Biden’s weakness and third-party challengers will conspire to grant Trump a second term in the White House, and the lickspittles and thugs with whom he has surrounded himself will have the run of the place. Trump will ignore the courts. Congress will fail to rein him in or eject him from office. The permanent bureaucracy will be neutered. The military will abandon its oath to the protect and defend Constitution when Americans invariably “take to the streets” in protest. A crisis will follow, and there are no guarantees that the Constitution will emerge intact on the other end of it. This scenario isn’t just plausible — it is imminent.

 

The Atlantic followed on with a special issue devoted to the multifaceted menace of a hypothetical second Trump term. The very “constitutional-democratic structure of the United States” hangs in the balance, David Frum wrote. Trump will “punish” his political enemies by siccing a corrupted Justice Department on them, deploy “federal troops against political demonstrators,” seize “voting machines,” and even defer “the next election in order to stay in power,” Barton Gellman speculated. “Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency,” Jeffrey Goldberg’s editor’s note read. “A second term, if there is one, will be much worse” than the first.

 

A three-bylined item in the Times paints a similarly grim portrait of America’s near future. “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,” the piece warned. More ominously, the conventional Republicans who served as a moderating influence in Trump’s first term will be personae non gratae. “Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality,” the Times continued. But would they?

 

The assumption that fuels the apocalypticism to which the Acela corridor has recently committed itself is challenged by McKay Coppins’s essay in the Atlantic’s symposium of dread. Coppins attempted to synthesize the seemingly incongruous assumptions that Trump will staff his administration with sycophants chosen more for their loyalty than their competence and, also, that those sycophants will deftly wield the levers of power to establish a cruel despotism. Coppins’s analysis leaves its readers more convinced of the former than the latter.

 

The Times conveys a similar impression in a dispatch from the orbit of Trump’s personality cult. The former president’s allies have turned entirely against one of Trump’s signature accomplishments in his first term: the nomination, confirmation, and appointment to positions of authority of astute jurisprudential minds whose adroitness and institutional knowledge reshaped the American legal landscape. The Federalist Society types are out, the Times reported. They don’t “know what time it is,” declared Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director and is now president of the pro-Trump Center for Renewing America.

 

The second Trump administration doesn’t want victories. It wants defeats. It is not interested in going through the ordeals that produced, for example, Middle East travel bans that passed constitutional muster or a policy of family separation at the border that survived scrutiny in the courts. Rather, they want to shoot for the moon with the understanding that their overreach will be slapped down in court, and that those defeats will give them an excuse to attack the foundations of the American system as unequal to the measure of the moment. That would be a reckless and cynical enterprise, but it could not also be a competent one.

 

According to their “conversations with Trump insiders” and their analysis of Trump’s campaign-trail pronouncements, Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen speculated about the high-profile face-plants the Trump administration hopes to engineer. Trump wants to “unleash” law-enforcement agencies like the FBI and the intelligence community “against political enemies.” He wants to “deport people by the millions per year” and will prioritize the hiring of “whoever promises to be most aggressive” in satisfying that desire. He seeks a “deep and wide purge of the professional staff” that manage executive agencies across administrations. He seeks to eliminate “social engineering and non-defense related matters” from the remit of the armed services.

 

The flunkies to whom these portfolios will fall will not be tasked with masterminding a series of unalloyed successes. Instead, their goal will be to establish the basis for an elaborate stabbed-in-the-back narrative designed to implicate the wreckers and saboteurs within the American system. Success in this endeavor would, in that sense, constitute failure.

 

That may be cold comfort. Dolchstoßlegende is a potent organizing principle; nothing justifies a purge quite like a mythological plague of internal sedition. The threat posed by a presidency that is about nothing more than the personality in the Oval Office is real insofar as policies don’t matter. They are the MacGuffin, and Trump is the protagonist. Those who oppose Trump’s aims, whatever they may be, will sort themselves into an enemy camp — indeed, that process of self-selection is likely the foremost objective of a presidency committed to losing.

 

But Trump World won’t get the losses it seeks in the absence of an intact and robust constitutional order in which the checks on presidential authority continue to function. The courts must block absurd reinterpretations of statute. Congress must circumscribe the president’s authority or fail to confirm his most zealous cronies. Bureaucrats must be willing to expose themselves to personal legal jeopardy to execute his ambitions, and military officers must enforce edicts they know could one day result in their prosecution.

 

A more responsible political culture wouldn’t test the tensile strength of America’s constitutional guardrails, but they have held so far. Trump World’s plan seems to rest on the assumption that they will continue to hold — if only to establish what it regards as the logical basis for their demolition. Trump’s courtiers may have grander ambitions, but Trump himself seems animated most by cleaning himself of the stink of an electoral loss. Indeed, beyond dishing out one last humiliation to his adversaries, it’s not at all clear that Donald Trump wants to get much done in his second term. Assuming dictatorial control over the United States is probably low on his list of priorities. After all, that would be a lot of work.