This Is What Democracy Looks Like

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, January 26, 2025

 

While Democrats were campaigning against Donald Trump as a threat to democracy in 2024, he was building a democratic mandate to govern.

 

The hallmark of President Trump’s initial days back in office has been doing exactly what he said he’d do.

 

His cabinet picks, for better and sometimes worse, reflect the kind of people who were around him in his campaign, and his priorities have, by and large, been the ones that he campaigned on clearly and consistently.

 

The basic dynamic of democratic accountability is that a candidate tells the voters how he or she will govern and then, if they approve of that agenda, proceeds to implement those plans.

 

No one can say they are surprised that Trump has dealt a hammer blow to DEI, moved quickly to secure the border and begin large-scale deportations, started rolling back green-energy mandates, or pardoned the January 6 rioters, among other things.

 

The sweep of some of these acts might have been unanticipated, but Trump is in a position to carry them out only because the American people blessed the basic approach (they weren’t enamored of the idea of January 6 pardons but didn’t care enough for it to be a dealbreaker).

 

One of the accusations against Trump in the campaign was that he’d pledged to be a dictator beginning on Day One.

 

This was always a witless smear — Trump joked about not being a dictator, except on Day One, referring to a planned barrage of executive orders. And here we are, after Day One through Six, and he hasn’t established a dictatorship, although he has issued many executive orders. As promised.

 

On the other side of the ledger, the Democrats displayed a contempt for the voters and the democratic process. The conspiracy to reelect Joe Biden while attempting to hide his marked decline from the public and get him into office again for a small cabal of aides to increasingly call the shots, or eventually to swap him out for Kamala Harris, was wholly undemocratic in spirit.

 

With Trump, what you see is what you get; with Biden, what you were getting was what you weren’t seeing.

 

Of course, the ploy became unsustainable after the first debate. The Democrats subsequently swapped out the incumbent president they were about to renominate after no real primaries or caucuses for the incumbent vice president they nominated with no primaries or caucuses at all.

 

The party acted perfectly within its rights, but this wasn’t the performance of people eager to have ordinary voters upsetting their plans.

 

Now, there are aspects of Trump’s M.O. that are troubling and wrong — he has an overly personalized view of government, an attenuated appreciation of the constraints of our constitutional system, and a willingness to run roughshod over all sorts of rule and norms.

 

These are significant drawbacks, but they aren’t a threat to democracy as the Democrats have defined it. His desire to have the U.S. Senate dispense with the normal confirmation process and allow him to recess-appointment his nominees, for instance, isn’t anti-democratic; it’s excessively democratic.

 

The Senate process acts as a check on a democratically elected president getting whatever he wants, ideally saving a president from, say, at the outset of his term, making impulsive decisions in the flush of a national victory (see Gaetz, Matt).

 

Ignoring duly passed congressional statutes, on the other hand, undermines both the rule of law and the democratic system. This, though, has become a fairly routine executive abuse. One reason that the Left deemed Trump an existential threat to democracy rather than an occasional risk to use slippery, motived reasoning to skirt the text and intent of federal statutes is that Democratic presidents have done this all the time.

 

In this connection, arguably the worst thing Trump has done is rewrite the TikTok ban on the fly by coming up with a 75-day grace period that is not in the law. But there hasn’t been much hue and cry about this — more outrage has been directed at Elon Musk’s alleged Roman salute — in part because then–President Biden did the same thing on a smaller scale when he refused to enforce the law as it came into effect right before Trump took office.

 

Trump will probably get away with his high-handedness on this one since it’s unlikely anyone will have standing to sue — a tactic that Presidents Obama and Biden often relied on, too.

 

None of this is good, and it should change. But the big picture of the past year or so has been an extremely well-known, highly accessible political candidate informing the American people — loudly, insistently, and often with very little nuance — what his priorities are and how he’s going to implement them.

 

That he’s now delivering isn’t an affront to democracy but a function of its working.