Talk of a Trump ‘dictatorship’: What’s behind the fears

As he interviewed former President Donald Trump in front of a town hall audience in early December, Fox News host Sean Hannity tossed out what seemed an obvious softball. Could Mr. Trump just reassure America, once and for all, that he “would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

Mr. Trump, however, had other plans.

“Except for Day 1,” he said, straight-faced and staring at Mr. Hannity. He paused for the briefest of beats, and then turned to the audience with a glimmer of a smile.

“He’s going crazy,” said the former president, pointing at Mr. Hannity as the audience chuckled.

“He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’” Mr. Trump continued. “I say no, no, except for Day 1. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that – I’m not a dictator, OK.”

As the Iowa caucuses and the official beginning of the 2024 election cycle arrive, the question of whether a second Trump term would result in the collapse of American democracy as we know it has gripped much of official Washington and U.S. pundits and political insiders.

Mr. Trump’s own words have fed this narrative. Among other things, he’s dehumanized political opponents as “vermin” who need to be exterminated, proposed that shoplifters be shot, said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and suggested that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley should be executed after a trial for treason.

His critics say those words should be considered against the background of past actions. They point to what the former president actually did in the wake of the 2020 election, when he falsely insisted the election had been stolen despite lack of evidence and numerous court rulings against him. He pushed state officials to overturn their results, tried to shut down the Electoral College vote count in Congress, and considered seizing voting machines with the U.S. military.

Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney calls Mr. Trump the “most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office” in her new memoir. Noted neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan wrote a lengthy piece in The Washington Post arguing a Trump dictatorship is “increasingly inevitable.” The Atlantic has published a special issue devoted almost entirely to its dire vision of a second Trump White House. 

Tomorrow, President Joe Biden will give a speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, marking the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and warning democracy itself is on the ballot. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has reacted as he often has in similar situations, using the uproar to create a political spectacle, with himself as the attention-grabbing center.

As in his answer to Mr. Hannity, he has at times dealt with the subject teasingly, dangling the prospect of authoritarian moves yet then backing off, as if it were all a joke.

At other times, particularly at his political rallies or on Truth Social posts, he can be much darker, as when he called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution over his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

So has America’s government “by the people” truly reached a turning point? Mr. Trump’s defenders often scoff that his critics have “Trump derangement syndrome” and overreact to his political antics. Many presidents, up to and including Mr. Trump’s predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have been called dictatorial, anti-democratic, and worse.

Yet in Mr. Trump’s first term, experienced officials such as chief of staff John Kelly blocked many of his most reckless proposals. The Trump team is planning for any second term to be staffed with loyalists who may not act the same way. The former president’s impeachments, indictments, and criminal and civil trials have already written a new chapter in the history of the United States. The book is open. Where will the story go now?

“It’s important not to overstate the threat that Trump poses to democracy, but it’s also important not to understate it,” says Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Past as prelude?

Mr. Trump is not a surefire White House winner in 2024. One of his GOP opponents might rise and defeat him in the primaries; efforts in the states to keep him off the ballot over insurrectionist charges could conceivably bear fruit; a criminal conviction in federal court might peel away a crucial portion of voter support.

But given current polls, it seems he has a substantial chance of sitting again in the Oval Office. Given that, how might he govern?

Professor Vladeck, a constitutional and national security law expert, thinks Mr. Trump poses a danger to the American democratic structure that is as serious as any in living memory. It is not unreasonable for voters to be at least “somewhat alarmed” about the former president’s rhetoric and plans for a second term, he says.

To many, the strongest case for alarm stems from the fact that Mr. Trump tried hard to overturn the outcome of a legitimate presidential election. He pressed Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” the votes to flip the state’s 2020 election results. He implored Vice President Mike Pence to block the counting of the Electoral College vote in Congress, despite Mr. Pence’s rebuttal that such an act would be unconstitutional. He did nothing for hours on Jan. 6, 2021, as his supporters stormed the Capitol building.

Critics say Mr. Trump’s behavior in the post-election period and his continued false claims about 2020 make it much harder to give him the benefit of the doubt when assessing the dangers of a second Trump term.

That does not mean he would morph into a dictator. But it does mean there is reason to believe he would push the envelope in ways an American president should never do, says Professor Vladeck. 

“Some of the specific things Trump has publicly said he wants to do I think would set us down a very dangerous path,” he says.

Worries about the anti-democratic course of a second-term President Trump have not had any appreciable impact on Mr. Trump’s popularity with Republican voters, however. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken in early December found his lead over GOP primary opponents had grown to 50 percentage points.

Mainstream media coverage that assumes Mr. Trump is a serious threat and presents that as a core issue of the election misses the concerns that are actually driving a lot of GOP voters, says Philip Wallach, a senior fellow and governance expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

Many are put off by statements from President Biden – such as his assertion that new restrictions on voting by mail in Georgia amounted to “Jim Crow 2.0” – which they feel are really aimed at delegitimizing conservative policies. They consider others’ talk of a looming Trump dictatorship to be similar overreach.

It is legitimate for presidents to want a federal workforce that is responsive to their concerns, says Dr. Wallach. Drawing up lists of Trump loyalists to place in key jobs, as some conservative organizations are doing, is not an inherently nefarious activity.

Mr. Trump may disregard certain norms for a president, particularly when it comes to his rhetoric, Dr. Wallach adds. But that does not extrapolate to him actually taking anti-democratic actions. “You can’t just sort of point to Trump personality attributes and reason from there to, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re about to have a dictator in America,’” he says.

“Keeping the [anti-Trump] rhetoric at such a fever pitch is not a very healthy thing for democracy,” Dr. Wallach adds.

Expanding powers of the presidency

The founders of the United States who wrote the Constitution intended that the presidency should not be a strong executive position. They feared that the centralization of power in a single job might create the sort of leader they had fought to free themselves from – a king.

But the presidency and the country are no longer what the founders envisioned. The federal government has kept pace with the growth of the U.S. population and economy – it now employs some 2 million civilian workers. A series of executive actions from aggressive presidents, often in periods of war or social or economic crisis, has greatly expanded executive branch authority and the limits of its possibilities. Many of these moves were criticized as monarchical or authoritarian at the time. 

President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the name of winning the Civil War. At the outbreak of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to pass the Espionage Act, which he then used to surveil and prosecute domestic war opponents.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed to the boundaries of presidential power and beyond with ambitious efforts to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. His bills to reorganize the executive branch and his efforts to pack the Supreme Court with new FDR-appointed justices drove opponents to distraction.

Such moves “opened Roosevelt to charges of seeking ‘dictatorship’ by weakening other branches of government and aggrandizing the power of the presidency,” writes historian David M. Kennedy in his Pulitzer-winning history of the FDR era.

Are plans for Mr. Trump’s possible second term just part of this continuum, an effort to use inherent power to shape the government in his preferred direction? That is the way conservative organizations involved in preparations for a Trump 2.0 frame their efforts.

The Heritage Foundation in Washington has organized like-minded groups into something it calls Project 2025. It says it’s preparing policy proposals, lists of possible personnel, and training procedures to enable a new Trump team – or the administration of any Republican – to hit the ground running a year from now.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. ... We need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration,” says the introduction on the Project 2025 website.

But critics say Mr. Trump’s agenda is likely to go far beyond what outside groups are planning. He has already floated at least one policy idea that even his allies at Heritage rejected as “terrible”: the creation within the federal government of a “credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values [to] support our way of life.”

“Left to his own devices, he would become a dictator in that he would ignore constitutional protections and the rule of law,” says Matthew MacWilliams, a scholar of authoritarianism and author of “On Fascism: 12 Lessons From American History.”

One of Mr. Trump’s first actions as president was something ruled unconstitutional. On Jan. 27, 2017, he signed an order that prohibited foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days. It sparked widespread protests, some at airports, and was blocked by federal courts as an infringement of the First Amendment guarantee of equal treatment of religion under the law.

A second, narrower attempt at a ban met the same fate. A third, revised ban was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court more than a year later.

Since then, the Supreme Court has shifted in a more conservative direction, due to President Trump’s three appointments. And the congressional GOP has also shifted in a pro-Trump direction as moderate and establishment Republicans have retired or lost primaries. The experienced officials who helped fill the top ranks of President Trump’s first administration – and at the time sought to head off what they viewed as bad policy moves – would be replaced in any second term by Trump loyalists.

“Last time, there were people in different institutions that stopped him,” says Dr. MacWilliams of controversial actions. “But those guardrails are gone.” 

Media alarms

Much of the national discussion about the possibilities and perils of any return of Donald Trump has been driven in recent weeks by a series of dire mainstream media reports and opinion pieces on the subject.

In mid-November, The Economist published a lead editorial titled “Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024,” focused largely on his possible effect on world events. The Washington Post around the same time ran a long piece headlined “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term.” The New York Times ran a series of reported pieces on how Mr. Trump plans to wield power if reelected. 

At the end of November, Mr. Kagan’s essay in the Post – titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” – had a scarifying effect on many Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. The doorstopper to this point is The Atlantic’s special issue of 24 stories by staff writers and contributors, titled simply “If Trump Wins.” 

It is important to remember that deeming an idea bad does not mean it is dictatorial. One may oppose cutting or raising taxes, but those are typical policy plans. A number of Mr. Trump’s floated ideas appear to be as much rally applause lines as actual proposals, and would be difficult to initiate, at best. How would a “credentialing body” to ensure teachers have “patriotic values” – which is part of Mr. Trump’s published education agenda – even work?

That said, there are at least three types of Trump proposals mentioned throughout the reporting on what might happen in a possible second term that experts on democracy and autocracy deem alarming. 

One is Mr. Trump’s evident desire to use the Department of Justice to enact revenge on his enemies and the perceived enemies of his supporters, including those who have been prosecuted for their actions on Jan. 6.

“I am your justice. And for those of you who have been wronged or betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said at his kickoff campaign rally in Waco, Texas, this spring.

Such a move would build on efforts Mr. Trump made in his first term to get prosecutors to pursue some of his enemies, such as his public demand in 2017 that the Justice Department open an investigation into the FBI’s scrutiny of his campaign’s contacts with Russia. Attorney General William Barr appointed a special counsel to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe in 2020.

Breaking down the wall between the White House and the Department of Justice would shatter the post-Watergate norm of federal prosecutorial independence once and for all.

Mr. Trump has said publicly that if he wins a second term, he intends to appoint a “real special prosecutor” to pursue President Biden and his family. The Washington Post has reported that he has plans to order investigations into some of the former officials and allies who have turned on him, such as former Attorney General Barr, ex-chief of staff Kelly, and ex-Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb.

Current Trump aides and defenders justify such potential moves by saying turnabout is fair play. President Biden is the real “dictator,” they argue, because his administration initiated the federal prosecution of Mr. Trump, his almost-certain opponent in the fall election. They dismiss Biden administration assertions that the president has had no role in the prosecution decisions of special counsel Jack Smith, who has filed criminal charges against Mr. Trump over his actions surrounding the 2020 election as well as his handling of classified documents.

A second Trump proposal that some experts say could be damaging to U.S. democracy is the possible expanded use of uniformed military forces for domestic law enforcement.

It is generally illegal to use federal troops in police actions on U.S. soil. There is, however, a law that allows exceptions: the Insurrection Act, which empowers presidents to declare emergencies and deploy regular military and federalized National Guard troops in cases of riots and other sorts of unrest in the states.

As president, Mr. Trump threatened to invoke this law in response to public Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white Minneapolis police officer. The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but some turned violent.

Mr. Trump declared in June 2020 that if a city or state did not suppress violent demonstrations, “I will deploy the U.S. military and quickly solve the problem for them.” He walked back from that line, but his supporters are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act as early as the first day of any second term. That would raise the specter of using regular U.S. military units against civil demonstrations, including any protests that might arise if he were elected. 

Campaigning in Iowa last year, Mr. Trump said he was blocked from using the military in Democratic states and cities when in office but that this wouldn’t happen in a second term. He called Chicago and New York “crime dens” and said, “The next time, I’m not waiting,” implying he might send in troops over the objections of local authorities.

The “Schedule F” plan

A third Trump proposal critics find problematic is a plan to fire thousands of civil service workers and replace them with known Trump supporters in an attempt to do away with an alleged “deep state” of executive branch liberals. Podcast host Steve Bannon and other former Trump aides have long blamed a shadowy administrative state for working against Mr. Trump’s policy goals during his presidency.

“This is the final battle,” Mr. Trump told a Republican convention in Greensboro, North Carolina, in June. “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists; we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”

Mr. Trump and his allies are reportedly planning to reclassify upward of 50,000 federal employees, stripping them of existing employment protections so they could more easily be fired and replaced with loyalists. By way of contrast, under current law new presidents get to replace about 4,000 political appointees.

The means to accomplish this would be an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” civil service level of replaceable personnel. As president, Mr. Trump signed such an order in his waning days, but it was overturned by incoming President Biden.

Mr. Trump might have had some reason to be frustrated with the bureaucracy he inherited. According to the pro-Trump group America First Policy Institute, some U.S. workers resisted implementing orders during President Trump’s administration. Federal attorneys refused to work on cases charging Yale University with discrimination against Asian Americans, according to AFPI, and Environmental Protection Agency officials did not inform political appointees about major upcoming cases.  

But many of Mr. Trump’s initiatives might be harder to carry out than their architects realize.

It’s not difficult to imagine the reclassification and firing of tens of thousands of federal workers as spiraling into chaos, for example.

Civil service employees have extensive legal job protections. Washington is full of lawyers whose specialty is litigation of issues surrounding federal employment. They would pounce on an executive order that attempts to overturn decades of established regulations.

“I think there would be a barrage of court challenges,” says Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Brookings Institution Governance Studies visiting fellow.

Any mass firings of government workers or widespread turmoil in the bureaucracy could lead to a serious disruption in government services, says Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees. Replacements chosen for loyalty to Mr. Trump instead of fitness for the job might be of little help.

“They really want to strip down the civil service in every possible way they can,” says Mr. Lenkart.

On the other hand, many of Mr. Trump’s aides and supporters might not be opposed to a hobbled or immobilized government.

“The one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-round is we’ve got to put in all-America patriots top to bottom,” said former Trump Defense Department official Kash Patel during an appearance on Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in early December.

During the same show, Mr. Patel added the media to the list of Trump 2.0 targets, saying they would retaliate against media figures who had “conspired” with President Biden to “rig” the 2020 election.

There remains no evidence that any election-changing voting fraud occurred in any state in 2020.

“We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out,” said Mr. Patel, currently a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank associated with preparations for a second Trump White House.

Mr. Patel is widely thought to be on Mr. Trump’s shortlist for CIA director or some other top post during a second Trump term. The Trump campaign disowned his statements from the “War Room” podcast, however, saying it has “nothing to do with” assertions like that.

Mr. Trump has long used the media as a political foil, slamming them as “enemies of the people.” Late last year, he complained about MSNBC’s election coverage and threatened to “make them pay for their illegal political activity.” There seems little doubt that a Trump administration would turn the knob up on anti-press animus in a second term.