Trump was asked by his faithful servant Sean Hannity last night if he would reassure the public that he has no plans to be a dictator and abuse his power. His answer was telling:
Let’s remember that Trump believes the presidency has dictatorial power. He made that clear many times:
Hannity wanted so desperately for him to unequivocally deny it but he didn’t do it because it’s a big applause line for his feral mob. They love it when he’s swinging his tiny hands around like that.
Meanwhile,earlier in the day:
He’s not just some podcasting gadfly:
Patel was hired in February 2019 as a staffer for President Trump’s National Security Council (NSC), working in the International Organizations and Alliances directorate, and in July 2019 became Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate, a new position created for him.[18] According to The Wall Street Journal, Patel led a secret mission to Damascus in early 2020 to negotiate the release of Majd Kamalmaz and journalist Austin Tice, both of whom were being held by the Syrian government.
In February 2020, Patel moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),[21] becoming a Principal Deputy to Acting Director Richard Grenell.
In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump had considered Patel for appointment as Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to replace Gina Haspel. According to Axios, Patel was to be appointed Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency immediately before a planned dismissal of Haspel, allowing him to head the agency in an acting capacity. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ezra Cohen-Watnick confirmed parts of the Axios report. Patel declined to comment.
In November 2020, Patel was made chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, a move that followed Trump’s firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Patel reportedly argued that Esper was disloyal to Trump by refusing to deploy military troops to Washington to quell the George Floyd protests.
AEI policy director Kori Schake argued that although neither Patel nor others were “confirmable”, the shakeup was primarily a matter of “spite” toward the Pentagon establishment. Foreign Policy magazine connected the move to Trump’s “refusal to accept the election results”. Based on interviews with defense experts, Alex Ward of Vox suggested that Patel’s appointment was “not sinister”, would “not change much”, and may have served an effort to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. According to an unnamed source quoted by Vanity Fair, Miller was a “front man” during his time as Acting Secretary of Defense while Patel and Cohen-Watnick were “calling the shots” at the Department of Defense. Another source told the magazine that Patel was the most influential person in the U.S. government on matters of national security.
After the November 2020 election, Patel reportedly blocked some Department of Defense officials from helping the Biden administration transition, according to NBC.
He remains in Trump’s inner circle and is expected to hold a powerful position in a new Trump White House.
Trump tried to overturn the election results and incited his mob to storm the capitol to stop the transfer of power. And people are asking if he plans to be a dictator? Of course he does. he just ran out of time.
Update — Jonathan Chait has this right:
This exchange is best understood as Trump enjoying the idea of himself as dictator. Trump has always admired dictators and has longed to be granted the obsequious deference they are afforded. As president, his favorite moments were trips to places like North Korea, where he spoke admiringly about the way his counterparties were treated. (“He’s the head of the country,” Trump said of Kim Jong-un. “And I mean, he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”)
His allies have always found this trait embarrassing and wished to deny it. Republicans are angrily attacking media coverage of Trump’s promises to turn the government into a weapon of vengeance as a smear campaign.
“There is no longer any pretense. Not even a fig leaf about fairness,” complains Fox News self-style media reporter Howard Kurtz. “It’s not that [Trump] shouldn’t be held accountable for his own rhetoric and social-media posts, but I have never seen anything like this in my professional lifetime.”
Could the reason that Trump’s authoritarian threat is being covered in a different way than any previous candidate be that no previous presidential candidate has explicitly promised to use his power to crush his enemies as vermin? Kurtz does not consider this possibility. Media bias is the only explanation.
Trump’s allies likewise insist that coverage of his plans is actually a scheme to seed violence against Trump. “All of these articles calling Trump a dictator are about one thing: legitimizing illegal and violent conduct as we get closer to the election,” proclaims Senator J.D. Vance. “This extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler (because, they say, he might do what Democrats are doing right now) — should probably be given the name ‘Assassination Prep,’” warns the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.
The whole pretense of these complaints is that Trump has done or said nothing dangerous or unusual, and that reporting on his plans and public statements is a form of dangerous incitement. They are all but begging Trump to give them a shred of deniability. He can simply say, even with a wink, that he doesn’t wish to become America’s Putin. He won’t give them even that — because, to Trump, being called “dictator” is a compliment his ego won’t permit him to deny.
I love it that Howard Kurtz is having a fit over the coverage. Good. The media must keep it up so that it will finally penetrate to the people who are not paying close attention.