Lest anyone thinks that Donald Trump is the only president to muse about the benefits of dictatorship, recall that the previous Republican president joked about it as well. After meeting with congressional leaders days after the Supreme Court essentially declared him the winner he said, “I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” It was a very odd thing to say considering the just completed post-election saga that put him in the White House under an obvious partisan power play by the High Court majority but Dubya had a habit of saying the quiet part out loud just as Trump does. Republicans like that in their presidents.
But then they also like it when a president abuses his power as Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Trump have all done. It’s been a party tradition for the last 50 years.
Bush pushed the limits of presidential authority many times, from lying the country into war to legalizing torture. Both Reagan and Bush I were heavily implicated in Iran/Contra which was a direct usurpation of congressional authority. We don’t even have to mention Richard Nixon. He wrote the book.
During the Reagan administration, the conservative legal intelligentsia promoted their belief in the “Unitary Executive theory ” which held that under the Vesting Clause of Article II of the Constitution, the president has total control over all officials in the executive branch. One of the staffers in that administration pushing this theory of presidential supremacy was a young lawyer named John Roberts and in 2020, the Roberts Court in a 5-4 decision affirmed that interpretation. Considering that history, it should not surprise us that eventually we would get a GOP president who would just go for it.
You may recall back in 2019, Donald Trump bleating “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”. Back then some of the Unitary Executive proponents were a bit disturbed. Even John Yoo, the notorious lawyer for the Bush administration who wrote the legal opinion for the Justice Department that authorized torture believed that Trump was acting beyond the scope of his power.
In the first term Trump pushed the boundaries but was restrained by experienced members of his administration and, after the first two years, a Democratic Congress which impeached him for abuse of power when he blocked congressionally appropriated military aid unless a foreign leader helped him discredit a political rival.
His behavior after his loss in the 2020 election included many examples of abuse of power, not the least of which was his plot to overturn it. He was impeached again after the fact but the Republicans lost their nerve and failed to convict which would have deprived him of the ability to run again. It was inevitable that he would.
In 2023, as his campaign was revving up in earnest, the NY Times reported:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Much of what was revealed in that story was later formalized in Project 2025, which Trump insisted he knew nothing about.
It was the Unitary Executive on steroids and it has all come to pass in record time. But this is the sort of thing that average people probably can’t really wrap their minds around. Trump is firing people left and right, his Justice Department is “investigating” his political rivals and there are arcane legal arguments over whether he has the right to close down departments in the Executive branch unilaterally. This is all acutely disturbing to experts and political junkies but it’s probably too much to expect voters to understand what a huge departure from the norms this really is.
However, Trump has gone way beyond any of that now, taking his misinterpretation of Article II as a president’s “right to do anything I want” to previously unimaginable lengths with his immigration and crime policies. Most horrifying is the fact that the Republican establishment, particularly the Congress and state leaders, are aiding and abetting his abuses.
The unleashing of masked, unidentifiable ICE agents on America’s streets violently rounding up and abducting people who have committed nothing but the civil crime of being in the country illegally is a living nightmare for millions of people. They are building grotesque facilities all over the country that can only be described as internment camps and deporting people to foreign gulags and counties continents away from anywhere they’ve ever been with no money or support.
Now he has ordered the federalization of the nation’s Capitol, ginning up a crime emergency which doesn’t exist to justify sending in National Guard troops as a show of force. He admits this is being done for political reasons, saying on Tuesday, “I think crime is going to be the big thing,” in the midterms. He’s threatening to do the same to Chicago and New York.
During the campaign Trump was criticized for his draconian policies with suggestions that he was planning to be a dictator. When asked about it he said he wanted to be one for just one day to “drill, baby, drill” or some such nonsense. But over the past week he has repeatedly said that Americans like the idea of a dictator. Yes, he usually adds that he isn’t one, but insists that it’s something many people are fine with.
At the Kennedy Center last week he said that instead of calling him a dictator “they should say we’re going to join him and make Washington safe.” This week he’s brought it up again, several times. During a meeting in the White House on Monday he complained, “They say, ‘We don’t need him, freedom freedom… He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator. ’” The next day he made a similar comment: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,” adding later, “most people say ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.’ I’m not a dictator, by the way.” It’s pretty clear that Trump wants people to believe that dictatorship is just fine with the American people.
And he’s clearly fine with it as well since he believes he has unlimited power to do anything he chooses. He told his assembled cabinet, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.” If those aren’t the words of a would be dictator, I don’t know what would be.
It’s as if he is saying this over and over again to normalize it, make it something that the American people will no longer recoil from. Will it work? CNN reports that Trump’s followers are increasingly in favor of dictatorship — as long as Trump’s the dictator. (A little hat tip to George W. Bush there.) This explains why Trump is busily rebranding it as super popular.
The question is whether the rest of the country will be so sanguine. I could be wrong but it seems to me that most people would see Trump’s contemptuous comment, “they say, ‘We don’t need him, freedom freedom...” as if the word is some woke jargon instead of the fundamental concept of the American ideal, and realize that this man is un-American to his core. The big question is if they’ll even know he said it.
Yes, Donald Trump is behaving like a dictator and, so far, is getting away with it. He’s crude and ignorant about virtually everything but he understood on some instinctive level that the Republican Party has been preparing the ground for one since Richard Nixon tested the waters back in the early 70s. He saw the opening and went for it.
His people are all there for it:
Salon
