Will Trump Be a Dictator If Elected Again?

In a word, no. Trump is smaller and weaker, and the country bigger and stronger, than Trump's bordering-on-paranoid critics would like us to believe.

The Left — you know, those in the chattering class who want to “defend democracy” by making it impossible for roughly half the electorate to vote for the candidate they want by wiping his name off the ballot — regularly lecture us that Trump will be a “dictator” if he gets to the White House again. (Biden, though, will not be a dictator if he’s installed, not by a normal election, but by judicial fiat that tortures the Fourteenth Amendment to death).

Is Trump-as-Caesar plausible? Let me ask a more focused question: Is there any realistic chance it’s going to happen? Prof. Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School (and son of the famous former Seventh Circuit Judge), takes a look.

No US president has ever been a dictator. Nonetheless, accusing the other side’s candidate of seeking dictatorial powers has become a quadrennial ritual, one that has started early this time around. In a widely circulated Washington Post commentary [recently], Robert Kagan, repeating his earlier prediction that former President Donald Trump would become a fascist leader, warned that he would become a dictator if he is elected again in 2024.

Were our liberal friends just wondering, gosh, how have things become so polarized? Well my goodness! For some common sense, honesty and sobriety on that subject, see Paul’s piece here.

Trump was and is many things, most of them bad. But he wasn’t a fascist when he was president, and he won’t be a dictator if he is elected a second time. Far from a strongman, Trump was weak throughout his previous term. His main accomplishments – a tax cut, a stimulus package during the pandemic, and appointments of conservative (but largely mainstream) judges – all went through normal constitutional procedures, with Congress fully involved. Meanwhile, Congress thwarted Trump’s promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

Looking at the facts about Trump’s term in office is sooooo much more boring than shouting that the sky is falling.

Likewise, Trump’s most notable attempts to act unilaterally – to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program, add a citizenship-status question to the census, and cut environmental regulations – were all blocked by the courts or whittled down in response to judicial challenges. Trump’s own subordinates disobeyed his orders to block investigations of his activities and bring frivolous lawsuits against his opponents. And Trump’s most consequential foreign-policy decisions – withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, for example – were solidly within the tradition of presidential authority in that domain.

And all that was before Trump became a lame duck, which he’ll be if he wins this year.

Trump was a weak president because most voters disliked him.

Which is still the case. His personal favorability ratings are in the tank. Not a single poll shows him getting more than half the popular vote. In 2016, he struggled to get to 46% — and that was before the single worst moment of his political life on January 6, 2021.

Every Democrat and even a few Republicans could afford to oppose him. Unable to achieve majority popular support, he could only pretend. Though he tried to bully the judiciary, those efforts failed. “My judges,” as he called them, ruled against him over and over when he challenged the 2020 presidential election results. He couldn’t get the huge federal bureaucracy to do his bidding because he lacked the wisdom and patience to manage it.

And his wisdom and patience (or any other source of strength that might help him impose a dictatorship) are fading as time marches on — a march that goes in only one direction. It’s not just Joe Biden who will become weaker and more addled. Trump will be 78 by inauguration day a year from now.

Kagan argues, nonetheless, that this time Trump’s machinations will be different and more dangerous, pointing out that he

…will order investigations and trials of his political opponents – a typical move from the dictator’s playbook. Trump has indeed threatened as much, vowing to prosecute his own former attorney general, William Barr, and his former chief of staff, John Kelly, among others. But if we have learned anything about Trump, it is that we should take his promises with a grain of salt. He never did “lock up” Hillary Clinton, after all, and he already tried to empty the federal bureaucracy with the notorious “Schedule F” executive order toward the end of his term. Nothing came of it except bureaucratic confusion….

Trump neither knows nor cares that a president cannot simply order the federal bureaucracy around. A president must cajole, compromise, and plead. But even if Trump does that, government investigators and prosecutors will not bring cases against people like Barr and Kelly, who have committed no crimes. If they are somehow forced to, expect mass resignations, leaks, public repudiations, and a field day for the press. Judges will throw out the cases, and juries will not convict. Kagan thinks that if Trump wins his current trials, judges will be afraid to rule against him if he becomes president. This both overstates Trump’s current legal jeopardy and vastly underestimates the integrity of the judiciary.

I was a career attorney at DOJ for many years before anyone noticed Donald Trump. To be honest, I think the Department has indeed become more politicized than when I was there. But it has hardly become politicized in ways favorable to Trump — much to the contrary (see, e.g., Bob Mueller & Co. and Jack Smith & Co.). And the good news is that, in my view, and having known these people, the critical mass of my former colleagues retains a devotion to the rule of law and the country’s most important traditions that makes hijacking them to the extent necessary to implement anyone’s version of a dictatorship impossible.

So Prof. Posner seems to me to be spot on in arguing that Trump can’t and won’t become a dictator. But for all his astute observations, I think he largely misses the main reason this isn’t going to happen, even though that reason became evident on, of all things, January 6 and its aftermath.

The main thing the Left would like us to take away from January 6 is how outrageous and scary it was. And let’s face it, that’s not just huffing and puffing. But the actual, enduring lesson for us is how quickly and completely it failed. In part, it failed because it was a half-a**ed effort to begin with: The idea that mob dressed up in buffalo horns and body paint was going to topple the government of the United States was preposterous from the get-go. They were, to say the least, pitifully unprepared for civil war however well prepared they were for Halloween. And now, of course, the main thing hundreds of them need to prepare for is jail.

But the main reason it was inevitable that they would fail to “hijack American democracy” is the same reason Trump won’t either, even if in a second term he were to try: You’re simply not going to displace over 200 years of constitutional governance with Palace Rule over the opposition of every major institution in the country. A Trump-imposed dictatorship would be opposed by a huge majority of the Congress, the courts, the military, the press, the corporate world, academia and every instrument of the culture. It could not possibly be sustained, and would collapse in 24 hours.

A second Trump term very likely won’t be pretty. His instincts are bad and his devotion to traditional norms of governance even worse. But, the Left’s screaming to the contrary, it won’t be a dictatorship.