I’ll try to keep this simple:
(1) Donald Trump is acting as a dictator.
(2) He is fairly easily defeated time after time when people fight back.
(3) Far too few people are fighting back.
I think that’s pretty much what I have. But I’ll elaborate a bit.
[So…after I wrote this, on Monday evening Trump illegally attempted to fire Fed Board governor Lisa Cook, and she rejected the move. Rather than revise what I wrote, I’ll let you read it with that story in mind.]
On the first point: Trump is acting as a dictator. He’s repeatedly just ignoring the law, the Constitution, democratic norms, and any other built-in constraints on the presidency. Monday was as good an example as any; he signed, for example, an executive action purporting to not only make flag-burning illegal (despite Supreme Court Court decisions otherwise) but to set sentences for violations – all of which is something that under the Constitution is done by passing laws, not through presidential edicts. That’s just one of several examples from one day; overall, there’s everything from the very serious (such as deploying troops in US cities or disappearing people to foreign nations) to the seemingly frivolous, such as building a new room in the White House without the necessary permits.
It’s impossible to get inside any politician’s head, much less this one, but my best explanation of all this is that Trump simply believes that the presidency is an elective dictatorship and that all the attempts to prevent him from acting on his whims in his first term were an unusual plot to dethrone him, not the normal workings of a constitutional republic. That’s speculative; what is certain is that he’s designed his second presidency so that no one in the White House, and perhaps no one at all, will ever tell him that he can’t do something he wants to do.
On to the second point: Earlier in the year, I wrote items documenting times that Trump was confronted and lost. I’ve stopped doing that, in part because I don’t want to be misleading. But it’s still true that when he’s confronted, he usually backs down or flat-out loses. There’s a reason he’s earned the “TACO” nickname (for Trump always chickens out). We may have seen another of these yesterday; the administration has been planning a military occupation of Chicago, but with the city and state government fighting back, Trump indicated he may be retreating.1
It’s not surprising that he’s easy to defeat. Trump remains terrible at the actual job of presidenting. He doesn’t work at developing his professional reputation, and he constantly undermines any chance of being popular among anyone but his strongest supporters. Richard Neustadt tells presidents that their greatest advantage is their ability to access information, but Trump shuts out any possibility of learning things that he could exploit.
Indeed, one of the reasons some still don’t see Trump as dangerous is because so much of what he does is obviously pathetic. There’s no master plan, or even much of any kind of plan. Just impulses. We’re not dealing with a Richard Nixon, who worked harder than anyone else. Or a Dick Cheney, who mastered the art of bureaucratic infighting.2 Let alone someone really good at the job. Such as Dwight Eisenhower, who was brilliant at knowing which battles to pick and also how to stay popular and how to use that popularity in his favor.
Trump displays none of those skills. He basically has one move: Bully his way around, bull in a china shop style. It “works”if no one fights back or if more clever allies rescue him; it doesn’t work the rest of the time; and either way there’s plenty of damage and nothing worthwhile happens.
Which gets to the last part. Those who have fought Trump’s autocratic power-grabs stand a good chance to win…but too many have just surrendered.
Why? I do think that Perry Bacon is correct that at least some institutions are going along because they’re perfectly happy with what’s happening. Indeed, I think in some cases they may be reasonably happy about an autocracy. It’s easy for many to see the risks to themselves from democracy without realizing its advantages.
But I think plenty of others sincerely think that Trump’s authoritarianism – as obvious as it is to some of us – is not a real worry, and that therefore there’s no particularly reason to oppose him as long as he appears to be a route to policies they seek. Or figure that someone else will take care of it.
And still others presumably are quite aware of what Trump is – and are frightened to fight back. It’s understandable; even defeating a normal President of the United States often has very real costs, and this one is capable of all sorts of things. Even if they entail very damage to himself, his party, and the nation.
I can’t say much to those who are happy undermining the republic. For everyone else, however, I’d just emphasize that Trump’s buffoonery make him very possible to defeat…but also that if enough people surrender to him, he could wind up fully destroying the republic, incompetence and all. And the history of autocracy is full of those who regretted failing to stand up and fight when they still could.
I’ll remind everyone that plenty of people and institutions have fought him and seem to have done just fine. Consider the law firms that refused to be bullied, or Wesleyan University and its president, Michael Roth. Or George Mason, of all places, and its president, Gregory Washington. Plenty of media outlets haven’t backed down. And while Trump’s attacks on his enemies, including some politicians, are threatening, most of those who oppose him, from Democratic state attorneys general to the millions who have joined public protests and demonstrations, are doing just fine so far.
The people who have the most leverage to fight for the Constitution, however, haven’t. But they still could. A handful of Republicans in Congress (especially in the Senate) could force him to back down; two Republicans on the Supreme Court could choose to support their policy goals but protect the rule of law. Perhaps they think there’s some line they’re waiting for him to cross before they act; if so, they might want to look around at what he’s done lately.
But even without them, Trump can be defeated and the Republic can be saved, despite the ongoing and severe damage. If enough people choose to do so.
There are wins. But many are not quite what they seem. The megabill, for example, had some things that Trump really wanted — but the bulk of it was standard Republican policy goals, much of which (such as slashing Medicaid) that Trump had opposed.
Yeah, I know, Cheney wasn’t a president. What was I going to do — come up with something about the presidency George W. Bush was good at? Other than, years too late, realizing that he shouldn’t be trusting Dick Cheney.