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A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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politics
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Quite honestly, I go back and forth on whether a Trump second term would result in a dictatorship. Don't get me wrong, he would do immense damage to our democracy and should be kept as far away from power as possible. (Preferably in a prison cell.)
Trump's first term, though, showed that Trump was often too incompetent to fulfill what he wanted to do. Not only that, but he was prone to get distracted by shiny things. He's going to go after the "deep state" and kick out anyone who doesn't support him? Well, first he needs to hold a press conference with a hurricane map that he marked up with a sharpie.
All this being said, the best case scenario for a Trump second term is that democracy is seriously wounded. We could emerge from it still with our voting rights intact, but with our entire democracy vulnerable to the next guy who can con a group of people into thinking that he's protecting them from The Other by removing everyone's rights.
There is a bluprint out there in the open :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Some people are seriously planning to take down US democracy...
Seems like a good reason for the party to adapt in order to secure as much participation from as many likeminded voters as possible.
"Not Trump" is not as universally convincing as I fear the party is assuming. It's sufficient for you and I, to be sure.
Right. I didn't address this in my comment because I wanted to focus on Trump himself. Whatever Trump does, he'll likely use this plan to destroy our democracy.
If Trump gets into office again, our best hope would be that 1) the institutions can survive Project 2025 and 2) Trump and Co are too incompetent to enact their plans. I wouldn't want to bet my life on either of these, though. A better hope is to work to keep Trump (and anyone else like him) away from any position of power all the way from President to city councilman.
Reagan started to get in to ideas of unitary executive theory and Bush was another proponent. The founders often debated, famously Hamilton, what the "executive" role actually meant for the office, and it was left vague as a lot of their ideas were. In the context of the time you had landowners being allowed to vote, the whole point of the government was basically to ensure no states had power over any other, then over time the executive branch developed and expanded and presidents had to see what that meant testing limits over time. I don't think this plan would be successful and if it were it would probably be bad by virtue of who would be in power.
Landowning was never a requirement on the federal level in the US. It was allowed to be a requirement for the states for a little while, few states bothered and the ones that did gave it up.
Look in to the men's suffrage movement, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky were the only three states to have full adult suffrage for white males before 1800.
18th century property qualifications:
Connecticut: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
Delaware: fifty acres of land (twelve under cultivation) or £40 of personal property
Georgia: fifty acres of land
Maryland: fifty acres of land and £40 personal property
Massachusetts Bay: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
New Hampshire: £50 of personal property
New Jersey: one-hundred acres of land, or real estate or personal property £50
New York: £40 of personal property or ownership of land
North Carolina: fifty acres of land
Pennsylvania: fifty acres of land or £50 of personal property
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: personal property worth £40 or yielding 50 shillings annually
South Carolina: one-hundred acres of land on which taxes were paid; or a town house or lot worth £60 on which taxes were paid; or payment of 10 shillings in taxes
Virginia: fifty acres of vacant land, twenty-fives acres of cultivated land, and a house twelve feet by twelve feet; or a town lot and a house twelve feet by twelve
This is an incredibly naive take (no offense), and is exactly the kind of thinking that allows authoritarianism to take root.
It can happen here
Regardless of Trump's competency, I can guarantee you that the anti-democratic powers that underpin Trump, galvanize his authority, and who do posses the competency to back his authority will absolutely accomplish a silent dictatorship in this country should he re-gain power.
You are absolutely insane to believe, given every single historical warning to the contrary, that this will not happen. I would go so far as to say that given the current geo-&-socio-political climate that this is the MOST likely scenario at the present time. History has a tendency to rhyme, and we are in the pre-global conflict phase of the paradigm. Every single person in this country who cares about the democratic process should take this threat deadly serious.
It can happen here.
It can happen to you.
It can happen in your lifetime.
WAKE THE FUCK UP.
I think you're misreading what I wrote. I was saying that the best case scenario of a second Trump term is that he continues his habit of getting in his own way and fails to institute a dictatorship. But even then, he'd do so much damage that it would only be a matter of time before the next wanna be dictator used the doors that Trump opened to finish the job.
When even the best case scenario is "democracy is on life support," we've got to do everything possible to stop Trump's second term.
Of course, what I didn't mention in my original comment - and what likely tips the scales in what will happen - is not what Trump would do, but what others would do. When Trump won, I don't think the right was prepared for the amount of power Trump was going to let them wield.
They likely thought he would lose or would be a "typical Republican" up to that point - willing to bend the Constitution a bit but not outright shred it. By the time, they realized what they could do, they had no time to get plans together and people in place. The midterms had already occurred and Democrats controlled Congress.
Now, though, they have Project 2025. They are organized and know exactly what they need to do to fatally wound democracy. Would Trump get in their way and (accidentally) stop them from achieving their goal? It's possible, but I'm not willing to risk our democracy on that bet.
So you know about Project 2025, but you're still questioning whether or not they'd go through with it?
Assume they will.
I am morbidly curious just how bad project 2025 could go. Imagine entire economic collapse as the biggest employer in the US and biggest creditor on earth doesn't have the staff to pay bills. Just a room full of heritage foundation pundits asking each other who knows what the password is for the Federal Reserve or Treasury. Because they fired everyone there for being too woke.
I'm pretty sure we've seen a preview of how it will look. They've been using that playbook pretty consistently.
We can see a few examples. Kissinger for example would mess with the battle plans for Cambodia and we know that about 40% of the fatalities there were children, that it had o impact on Vietcong forces, ended between 150k-300K lives, creates 2.5 million refugees, and led to the bloodiest dictatorship in history. So here is an example of a pundit being appointed to run something where we can measure the outcome.
There's a bitter irony in the face of the system collapsing not because the masses rose up and fought for a better future, but because those seeking to enslave humanity finally got everything they thought they wanted...
I do it at work all the time. The moment someone starts giving me advice on how to do things I put them in-charge of it. Oh boy does the tune change fast and sometimes unexpectedly they do an awesome job. They sit there all day with their journalism degrees spewing out hateful shit for clicks and think that qualifies them to run things, well let's let them run things. Let their legacy be getting exactly what they want and demonstrating how little they know.
I think I did actually misread a bit of what you wrote initially. I originally took your comment as you saying that you thought it was unlikely he could stop stepping on his own dick long enough to actually institute tin-pot authoritarianism. After re-reading both your comments I do believe you understand the threat that we are facing. So, forgive me there for misunderstanding your position.
However, the part that scares me the most is the fact that all these legal proceedings are going to turn him into a cornered animal. Every vindictive, vitriolic, nihilistic, violent part of him is going to be ratcheted up to a truly unhinged level that I believe will fracture his personality. Once he is made to feel vulnerable he will lash out at everything and everyone that made him have to go through one fucking second of cognitive dissonance.
The most dangerous people are the ones who are capable of being truly dishonest with themselves.
I believe that's the tl;dr summary of the article in the OP.
I wouldn't put it passed him to try to weasel into a 3rd (or indefinite 2nd) term but given the rampant nepotism and astonishing loyalty I think it more likely his family will all start rotating into that role and we'll see a Trump on the ballot for the next 2-3 decades. Plenty of time to slow cook that frog.
He's already said this kind of thing. He admired the Chinese President for declaring himself President For Life and he said that he deserves a third term for the "Russia Russia Russia investigation." His age might play into him actually going for a third term. He'd be 82 in January 2029 - assuming his lifelong bad health habits didn't get to him first.
I could see him trying to appoint his successor, but none of his kids are as "charismatic" as he is. (Using the term "charismatic" loosely to describe the hold he has on some people. Not sure what else to call that.) A Trump Dictatorship could oddly result in a civil war as we get Trump Jr MAGAs fighting Greene MAGAs or Lake MAGAs etc. All while the tattered remnants of the Democrats try to use the chaos to right the ship.
The Supreme Court will find a way. Clarence Thomas will get a new boat.
They will just say the first term or second term doesn't count because he wasn't elected he won the EC.
Trump governed like a milquetoast Republican and most of what he did the Democrats haven't undone, the tax breaks for corporations, the tariffs, the immigration policy, the fucking wall.
The rhetoric is part of the hyperreal spectacle of politics and it's hilarious how so many people still clutch pearls over his insane personality even after his first term. His entire political brand was created by provoking outrage and he continues to do this. The threat to democracy is the Republican party and people forget how they already stole the 2001 election, and how fraudulent American elections historically were. The "fair" election is a very recent thing, like last 50 years. Some of the stories from the past are hilarious too like literally paying people to get on busses and carting them to polling stations.
You don't go from 0 to dictatorship in a couple years. You have to wait for slow burn of propaganda, build support with appointees, etc. You can't judge this from the first term.
I think the biggest factor isn't going to be Trump himself. If it was just him, he might trip over his own feet and keep himself from instituting a democracy. (Not that I'd bet our democracy on that happening.)
The bigger danger are the people who would be (and already are) working behind the scenes. I think they were caught by surprise in 2016 - both in Trump's win and in his willingness to go further towards dictatorship than they even hoped to achieve. They weren't prepared and we got the chaotic slip that did damage, but didn't result in President Trump For Life.
This time, they're prepared. If they get into power via a second Trump presidency, our best hope is that the institutions are sturdier than they seem to be and possibly that Trump is even more clumsy - to the point of sabotaging his own team's plans. That's not a very big hope, though. It's about the same level as saying "I'm completely broke so I'll spend my last few dollars on this lottery ticket to become rich." Could it happen? Sure, but it's much more likely that you/America lose.
And even if we somehow, miraculously, emerge from a trump presidency with our democracy intact, it would be on life support. As you said, you don't go from 0 to Dictatorship. Trump would have turned the dial enough that some future Trump figure would get into power and turn it the rest of the way.
The only way to ensure that our democracy is safe is to keep Trump - and everyone supporting him - as far from power as possible.