Many in the anti-Trump camp have been reacting hysterically to the dictatorial rhetoric Donald Trump has been ramping up recently. Hope emerged after several states removed Trump from their ballots, signaling the possibility that we could outright short-circuit catastrophic damage to our democracy in the event that Trump is elected and moves ahead with his deranged plans.
With this week’s Supreme Court ruling that states do not have the authority to remove federal candidates from the ballot, those hopes have been crushed.
People think that Trump will act like a dictator because that is what he has been telling everyone – only for a day, however. Of course, he should be disqualified from office in the hearts of voters for even hinting at the possibility of authoritarianism and the worry is that there’s no reason for him to stop after the first day. I assume that Trump supporters defend his statements by claiming that he was merely being facetious or that it was just a figure of speech.
Nevertheless, the Trump-influenced Project 2025 is quite incriminating. It’s a conservative plan that involves replacing as many government employees as possible with Trump sympathizers, commanding the DOJ to investigate Trump dissenters, and expanding presidential powers by bringing independent departments like the FCC and the DOJ under direct presidential control.
While these are all at best dictator-adjacent, the real worry with Trump being president is the damage he can do even with existing presidential powers. Given how Trump’s last presidency went, I don’t think we have to worry about him actually fulfilling his wildest authoritarian dreams if he indeed has any.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and promised to build a wall along the entire southern border. Neither of these came to fruition. He promised to cut economic regulations, only for 90% of his deregulation efforts to be blocked by the courts as early as the start of 2019 and had a nearly 80% general loss rate in courts by the end of his presidency. Hitler would be embarrassed.
The list goes on but the point is of course that the executive branch is only one of three branches of government and opposition from both sides of the isle regularly frustrated Trump’s plans, from the grandest to the modest. We can expect roughly the same outcomes during a possible second term.
If the concern is that there will be less of an opposition if he systematically replaces members of the executive branch with sympathizers, it’s useful to remember that Trump had an extremely high turn-over rate within his handpicked administration.
Many high-ranking Trump appointees resigned despite them being selected for their perceived loyalty. It turns out that many of these resignations were caused by Trump’s inability to heed sensible advice and his insistence on following his own uninformed plans on matters of strategic importance. Former Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis resigned partly because he wanted nothing to do with the legacy of the Trump administration.
This indicates that the nature of American politics is such that there are limits to what ideologically aligned subordinates are willing to do, particularly when ordered to do something that legitimately threatens national security or our institutions. Former Vice President Mike Pence refused Trump’s orders to overturn the elections precisely because it was preposterous and would be ultimately futile.
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Dictators are able to exert unrestrained control because their subordinates are under threat of death, imprisonment, and torture. Fortunately for us, Trump doesn’t have these methods of coercion at his disposal and, as his tenure demonstrated to potential followers, criminal prosecution is a strong possibility if you carry out Trump’s legally dubious orders.
So perhaps it’s best to tone down the hysteria around Trump’s highly unlikely dictatorial plans. There is plenty of damage Trump can do within the current constraints on the presidency.
If he is elected once again, he can continue to make decisions while ignoring expert counsel. He can again hurt our farmers by enacting poorly thought out tariffs – it would be within his legitimate presidential powers to do so. It’s also not an impeachable offense to continue antagonizing our allies and undermining our geopolitical interests.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.