Trump, if reelected, might not become a dictator

In 2016, when the once-preposterous idea of President Donald Trump looked increasingly possible, many commentators — not only on the left, but on the anti-Trump center-right — warned that Trump’s election victory could become an “extinction-level event” for American democracy. Today, after four years of Trump and three years of a Joe Biden presidency, another Trump victory seems distinctly possible, with many polls showing him with a small lead over Biden. Should we be very afraid — and of what?

Some political analysts speculate that to many Americans, Trump in 2023 seems far less of a menace than Trump in 2016: We already had a Trump presidency, and the sky didn’t fall. Yes, almost 351,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in Trump’s last year in the Oval Office, but the pandemic also killed huge numbers of people in other countries that were not led by Trump.

Others argue — much more sensibly, in my view — that our past experience with a President Trump term confirms the danger. Above all, after Jan. 6, 2021, we know for certain the answer to a question that was first raised in 2016: whether the notoriously egomaniacal Trump would accept a defeat at the polls. Not only does he still refuse to accept his loss in 2020, he tried to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power through a de facto coup attempt that included junk lawsuits, state-level pressure to appoint rogue electors, and finally a mob assault on Capitol Hill. In a Colorado lawsuit that accuses him of being an insurrectionist, his defense rests on the claim that he didn’t swear an oath to “support” the Constitution of the United States — only to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.

Trump detractors also say that a second Trump term is likely to be far more dangerous than the first because, having learned from the experience of being stymied by civil servants and administration officials bound to legal and institutional norms, he is likely to appoint rabid loyalists and zealots who will carry out even illegal or immoral orders. A newly elected Trump won’t have people like former White House chief of staff and retired Marine general John Kelly around him; he’ll have people like retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was briefly his national security adviser in 2017 — and who is now a full-on conspiracy theorist calling for “one religion” in America.

Can Trump be stopped by the “checks and balances” of our political system? Veteran conservative journalist and colleague Mona Charen throws some cold water on this hope. She points out that the Republican Party has abdicated its responsibility to curb Trump, the Democratic Party is too weak and handicapped by its own internal conflicts, and the press is mired in partisan polarization. Charen acknowledges that the military is likely to refuse to follow illegal orders, and the courts are still largely committed to upholding the law. But those guardrails are growing dangerously brittle.

Could Trump become an actual autocrat or dictator? That still seems unlikely in a country with 50 state governments and a population in which the majority would reject autocracy. A more likely scenario is that the return of the GOP’s clown prince may trigger domestic political struggles at unprecedented levels, with different public institutions openly at war with each other. From there, it’s one step to chaos and institutional collapse. A second Trump term does not spell inevitable doom for American democracy. But it will be a new and riskier round in a dangerous experiment.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.