Trump, the dictator? Not likely.

But the GOP can do much better than nominating him.

The polls now suggest not only that Donald Trump is almost certain to be the GOP presidential nominee, but also that he’s better than even-money to win the general election. (I don’t expect the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision keeping him off the ballot to stand.) Accordingly, the mainstream media is running hard with the claim that, in his second term, Trump would behave like a dictator. Bill addressed that claim in this excellent post.

Bill made two main points. First, claims of an impending Trump dictatorship are speculative and almost surely overblown. Second, the left’s professed reverence for democracy is inconsistent with its behavior. That behavior now includes a successful (so far) effort to induce judges to prevent Americans from electing Trump president.

Dan McLaughlin elaborates the second of these points in this column. He argues that, if by dictator we mean a president who would (1) try to cut other branches and levels of government out of the picture and call their legitimacy into question; (2) criminally prosecute political opponents while trying to cover up criminality in his own family; (3) threaten courts with dilution of their powers and attack their legitimacy when they don’t rule his way; (4) threaten to breach longstanding rules he once described as bulwarks against tyranny; (5) disregard constitutional restraints on his office to issue sweeping executive fiats affecting the everyday lives of Americans, thereby contradicting his own prior statements about the law; and (6) openly acknowledge that he’s defying prior court rulings — if that’s what we mean by dictator, then we already have one in our current president.

All of this leaves open the question of whether Trump would go well beyond the “dictatorial” actions McLaughlin lists. In other words, it leaves open the question of whether Trump would be a dictator in the strong sense.

My position has been that a second Trump term would be worse in this regard than his first term, but that he would not pose a serious threat to democracy. I defended the first of these propositions here.

As to the second, I agree with McLaughlin that there’s very little chance Trump would abolish the Constitution and try to make himself some sort of ruler-for-life. I also agree that if Trump were to attempt such things, he wouldn’t be able to pull them off.

Yet, as McLaughlin says, there’s still a considerable amount of damage Trump could do to our constitutional order. And I agree with McLaughlin that the very existence of concerns that Trump will act like a dictator — concerns that Trump made legitimate with his behavior after losing the 2020 election and with some of his recent statements — is another reminder that the GOP should not re-nominate Trump.

The party has two good alternative candidates, neither of whom would be the subject of serious concerns about “dictatorship.” Nikki Haley runs far ahead of Biden in the polls. And for those who don’t find Haley conservative enough, Ron DeSantis offers the best of Trumpian policies with only a small fraction of the baggage.

But neither Haley nor DeSantis stands much of a chance against Trump. So I’ll conclude this post by returning to the issue of Trump as “dictator” in a second term.

This highly speculative issue is most reasonably addressed objectively — by considering what Trump did in his first term and what he says he’ll do in his second.

In his first term, Trump did not behave like a dictator. To my knowledge, he defied no court order. He made no changes to the structure of government. Elections were held and their results were upheld.

It’s true, of course, that Trump did not accept his defeat in 2020 and called a crowd to Washington in the hope of reversing that result. This was an affront to democracy and a huge stain on Trump’s record. It gives credibility to serious fears about a second Trump term. Yet, as McLaughlin points out, once the result was certified, Trump quietly left town.

Let’s turn, then, to what Trump now says about being a dictator. In his most direct comment on the subject, he told Sean Hannity he would not be a dictator “except for Day One.” Trump added: “We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

If we take Trump at his word, he’s saying that his exercise of dictatorial powers will be limited to executive orders on immigration (“closing the border”) and natural resource exploitation (“drilling”).

If so, Trump would be no more of dictator than recent Democratic presidents have been. They, too, issued major executive orders on immigration and drilling. In fact, Trump is describing less dictatorship than we’ve seen from his predecessors. Let’s not forget Biden’s executive order on forgiving student debt.

Unfortunately, and here I dip into subjectivity, I doubt that Trump’s abuses of power would end on Day One, as he claims. It sounds to me like he plans to use the administrative state to implement other measures that, under the Constitution, can only be implemented with congressional approval.

At the same time, I think we can dismiss alleged Trump statements like the one about having the Justice Department investigate William Barr, Gen. Kelly, and Gen. Milley, and we can certainly dismiss concerns that they will stand trial on bogus charges. Even allowing for the appointment to key positions of less principled prosecutors than the ones who populated these jobs in his first administration, Trump won’t find prosecutors willing to bring frivolous charges against these men. And if somehow he does, the prosecutors won’t be able to win convictions.

Trump himself probably understands this. If reports about Trump saying he’ll have these three investigated are true, this was surely just a case of him blowing off steam.

It’s also important to keep in mind the legal jeopardy some of Trump’s most loyal and unprincipled backers currently face. Trump’s latest crop of team members talks a good bad game now, but once in office they likely will have enough sense to draw some lines, lest they end up being prosecuted for various abuses in a few years. It’s easy to imagine Trump complaining about staff disloyalty in a second term, just as he did in his first.

In sum, I end up where I began (I hope without boring those of you who made it to the end). Trump’s second term will likely be noticeably more authoritarian than his first, but will not amount to a “dictatorship” in the usual sense of that word. In all likelihood, it will not pose a threat to American democracy.