Don’t be fooled by Trump’s dictatorship jokes

Lest anyone think that Donald Trump is the only president to muse about the benefits of a dictatorship, recall that the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, did as well. Following a meeting with congressional leaders days after the Supreme Court essentially declared him the winner of the 2000 presidential election, Bush said, “I told [them] 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.” 

Considering the lengthy post-election saga that put him in the White House, it was an odd thing to say. But Dubya had a habit of saying the quiet part out loud, just as Trump does. Republicans like that in their presidents.

But then the GOP also seems to like when a president abuses his power as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump all have done. It’s been a party tradition for the last 50 years.

Bush pushed the limits of presidential authority many times, from leading (and lying) the country into war to legalizing torture. Both the elder Bush and Reagan were implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was a direct usurpation of congressional authority. We don’t even have to mention Nixon. He wrote the book on GOP scandal.

During the Reagan administration, the conservative legal intelligentsia promoted their belief in the unitary executive theory, which holds that under the vesting clause of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the president has total control over all officials in the executive branch. One of the administration’s staffers who pushed this theory of presidential supremacy was a young lawyer named John Roberts, and in 2020, the Roberts Court affirmed that interpretation in a 5-4 decision. Considering this history, it should not surprise us that we would eventually get a GOP president who would seize the moment.

In 2019, Trump declared, “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 his first term, Trump pushed the boundaries. But he was restrained by experienced members of his administration who respected the Constitution and, after the first two years, a Democratic Congress that impeached him for abuse of power when he blocked congressionally-appropriated military aid unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy helped him discredit Joe Biden.

Trump’s 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, one week before left office. But Senate Republicans — led then by that paragon of principle, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell — lost their nerve and failed to convict Trump. (A conviction would have deprived him of the ability to run for president again; in retrospect, it was inevitable that he would do so.)

Two years later, as his campaign for the 2024 GOP nomination was revving up in earnest, the New York 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, the Heritage Foundation initiative that Trump insisted he knew nothing about, which we now see as the unitary executive theory on steroids. It has all come to pass in record time. 

The president 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 departments in the executive branch unilaterally. This is all a huge departure from government norms, and the mechanics might seem confusing to people who are going about their everyday lives and only casually follow the news coming out of Washington, D.C. In fact, Trump and his MAGA acolytes are counting on such disorientation, which creates a smokescreen for the president’s misuse and abuse of power. He has taken his “right to do anything I want” to previously unimagined lengths — and the Republican establishment, particularly congressional and state leaders, are aiding and abetting his attacks.

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Trump’s decision to unleash masked, unidentifiable Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on America’s streets is a living nightmare for millions of people. They are building facilities across the country that can only be described as internment camps. They are deporting people to foreign gulags and countries with which they have no connection, family, money or support.

Now Trump is in the process of taking over Washington, federalizing the city’s police force and deploying National Guard troops by ginning up a crime emergency that doesn’t exist — and he has admitted doing so for political reasons. “I think crime is going to be the big thing [in the midterms],” he said on Tuesday. He’s threatening to expand his operation to Baltimore, Chicago and New York.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats often accused Trump of having fascist ambitions. When asked, he said he wanted to be a dictator for just his first day in office. 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 he insists it’s something many people would support.

In comments he recently made at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 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 brought it up again — several times. On Monday, during a meeting at the White House, 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.’” He made a similar comment the next day: “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.’” He added 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.”

But since he believes he has unlimited power to do anything he chooses, it’s pretty clear that he is open to entertaining the notion. As he said on Tuesday during a Cabinet Meeting, “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.

Trump is raising the prospect of a dictatorship over and over again to normalize it, to make it something from which the American people will no longer recoil — and that it’s accepted and even supported by many Americans. Will it work? CNN has reported that Trump’s followers are increasingly in favor of dictatorship — as long as he is the dictator. The question is whether the rest of the country will be so sanguine. 

In the meantime, even if he’s not quite embracing the term itself, the president is behaving like a dictator. And so far, he’s getting away with it. Trump is crude and ignorant about virtually everything, but on some instinctive level he understands that the Republican Party has been laying the groundwork for this since Nixon first tested the waters back in the early 1970s. 

Now, Trump senses an opening — and he is going for it.