By Peter Wehner
Friday, October 31, 2025
Give Donald Trump this much: He has never tried to hide
his malice, his lawlessness, or his desire to inflict pain on others. These
were on vivid display when he engaged in a multipart conspiracy
to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stood by as a mob
of supporters sought to hang
his vice president. These were displayed, as well, every day during his 2024
vengeance campaign. Yet more than 77 million Americans decided that he was the
man with whom they wanted to entrust the care of this nation.
For more Americans than not, and for many more
evangelical Christians than not, Trump is the representative man of our time.
His ethic is theirs. So are his corruptions. And for those of us who, in our
younger years, revered America as a shining
city upon a hill, a nation of nations,
the “last,
best hope of earth,” this is quite a painful period. America has lost its
moral bearings; as a result, it has also lost its moral standing in the world.
A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation. And
it’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots.
***
Trump is in the process of building
his own paramilitary force. He is invoking
wartime powers to deport people without due process, even suggesting that
American citizens may be sent to foreign prisons. He has deployed
National Guard troops to cities over the objections of local officials. In a
speech to American troops in Japan, he warned: “If we need more than the
National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.”
Trump has signaled that he is open to invoking
the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to deploy the
military in the United States. And he has claimed,
without legal justification, that he has the right to order the military to
summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs
on boats off the coast of South America. (The administration has yet to provide
evidence
to support its claims that the individuals who have been killed were cartel
members or that the vessels were transporting drugs.)
My colleague Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the U.S.
Naval War College, warns
that eventually what Trump is doing will become a new principle for the use of
force: “He is acclimating people to the notion that the military is his private
army, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by norms, unconstrained by American
traditions.”
Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the senior judge
advocates general, removing the officials who could obstruct the execution of
unlawful orders from the commander in chief. Their dismissals will also have a chilling
effect on those who remain. The firing of the JAGs is just one element of a
broader purge
of the military, which started at the beginning of Trump’s second term. In
February, five former defense secretaries, including James Mattis, who served
under Trump in his first term, wrote
a letter to lawmakers, saying the dismissals “raise troubling questions
about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove
legal constraints on the president’s power.”
Speaking of which: Trump views himself as the final arbiter of the legality of
anything he does. An executive order he signed in February says,
“The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are
controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No
employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance
an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that
contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of
law.”
There’s more. Trump is the most corrupt
and self-enriching
president ever. He is also conducting what The New York Times’ Jim
Rutenberg describes
as “the most punishing government crackdown against major American media
institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal
to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.” That includes suggesting
that the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the licenses of
television broadcasters that give him too much “bad publicity” and suing major
newspapers and networks.
He has targeted law
firms for political reasons and universities
for ideological reasons. As part of his disinformation campaign, he fired
the nonpartisan commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency
reported weaker-than-expected jobs numbers for July. He has called
judges who rule against him “lunatics” and “monsters who want our country to go
to hell.” And he
granted blanket clemency to the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attacks
on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including members of extremist groups such
as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious
conspiracy.
Trump has pressured
the Department of Justice to target, indict, and destroy those he considers to
be his political enemies. And he signed
memorandums targeting two officials from his first term, including Chris
Krebs, the former cybersecurity official who rejected Trump’s false claim
of widespread election fraud.
As for free elections, the cornerstone of democracy, the Trump administration
is using the levers of government to target “the financial, digital and legal
machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive
political world,” The New York Times reports.
Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the main
Democratic fundraising platform. He has also said
he’s going to “lead a movement” to outlaw electronic-voting machines and
mail-in balloting, in an effort to disadvantage Democrats. Cleta Mitchell, who
played a role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, threatens
that Trump could declare a national emergency to take control of national
elections. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham warns
that Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already well under way. “The
insurrection failed the first time,” Graham writes, “but the second try might
be more effective.”
Trump, having attempted to overthrow one election, can be
counted on to attempt to rig the next one. As J. Michael Luttig, a former
federal judge, warns in The Atlantic: “With his every word and deed,
Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in
defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to
the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.”
Trump learned from his first term; in his second
go-around, he’s placed MAGA cultists in every key position of power. They will
follow Trump to the ends of the Earth, knowing that a presidential pardon is
there for the asking, if necessary.
There’s little indication that the central institutions
of American life, including the
Supreme Court, are willing to check Trump as he seeks unprecedented and
nearly unlimited power. Nor is it clear that if they tried to do so, they would
succeed. Trump has so far largely abided by court decisions, but beyond a
certain point, on things he really cares about, he’ll likely ignore them. He
will ask about Chief Justice John Roberts a variation of the question
Joseph Stalin is supposed to have asked about the pope: How many divisions
does he have?
***
We’re less than one-fifth of the way through Trump’s
second term; things will get much worse. So it’s too early to know whether the
damage that Trump and his MAGA movement are inflicting on the foundations of
the United States is reversible, or whether the injury to our civic and
political culture is repairable.
If America recovers, the path will lie not simply through
electoral politics. The fate of the country rests on the recovery of republican
virtue, the cultivation of an active passion for the public interest, and a
willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. Words and
phrases such as honor and love of country have to stir people out
of their lethargy and into action.
We saw some of that in the “No Kings” protests,
but much more needs to happen. My colleague David Brooks, citing
the work
of the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, reminds us that
“citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.” Whether
we step up or not is a matter of civic will and civic courage. Can we summon
those virtues at a moment when American ideals are under sustained assault by
the American president?
A final thought: As we continue along this journey, into
places none of us has ever quite been before, it is worth holding close to our
hearts the words of the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel. They moved
me when I first read them, in the early 1990s, when so much was so different,
and I have cited them several times since, but they hold more meaning now than
ever.
“I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a
responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t
know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at
all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede:
that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
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