It’s way more likely than we think
David Frum is one Never Trumper from whom I still recoil even though I’m a big believer in a popular front against Trump. He’s still a wingnut in some very important ways. Nonetheless, this big Atlantic issue about what will happen if Trump wins has a number of good articles and I thought his was was especially thought provoking:
A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.
A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?
The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.
He goes on to point out that all the guardrails that existed in the first term are gone and that those who will be part of his new administration will be nothing but sycophants and henchmen along with groups of chaos agents and radical authoritarians:
This is what I found so interesting, though. He talks about the chaos that will ensue when he tries all these things which is not something I’ve seen too many people talk about. It’s not as if the rest of the country is just going to sit quietly by:
If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.
In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.
The outvoted would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the objective.”
So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.
And what might follow that? In 2020, Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election. Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.
[…]
That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic structure of the United States.
A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.
As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke” college students.
For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.
I can’t help but point out that Frum’s former boss, the man he extolled as the greatest president since Lincoln, also won on the thinnest of pretexts having lost the popular vote and obtaining the office with the help of operatives interfering with the vote count, his Governor brother and two Supreme Court justices appointed by his father. Even so, he was hardly humbled or chagrined by any of that and famously said “I got political capital and I’m gonna use it.” And boy did he, with the full support of the Republican establishment including people like Frum. It was obvious then that the GOP was off the rails.
Nonetheless, we are where are and he’s right that we are careening into the unknown. Trump and his henchmen want the majority to protest because they want the excuse to use the Insurrection Act to put it down, citing the January 6th precedent. That won’t be like the Tel Aviv protests. It would more likely be like Tienanmen Square. And that would be just the beginning.