Robert Kagan’s essay warning that a second Trump presidency could veer into dictatorship has lit a debate here and elsewhere about whether the claim was reasonable, absurd, alarmist, offensive, dutiful, or what.
I don’t imagine most people think they can know with certainty whether Trump would be a dictator. I am not even sure how we would put useful odds on it. I take the dispute instead to be about how strongly we are supposed to feel the concern. “It’s absurd to worry” seems to be clashing with “It’s absurd not to.”
I am with the worried, but idiosyncratically. What concerns me most does not at all depend on how likely Trump is to become a dictator, and it extends to possible dictators other than Trump whose identities are not yet known.
Not that I dismiss Kagan. Like Charlie I find it hard to imagine that enough of officialdom would back an incipient Trump dictatorship to make it stick. But then I recall my failure to anticipate how bad things would get by the end of Trump’s lame-duck period. I did not expect the Ellipse rally to lead to literal violence of the old-fashioned pre-DEI kind. Neither did I foresee the lengths to which current and former officials might go to assist Trump’s project. I would not have predicted, for example, that a retired general and former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, would muse publicly about military seizures of voting machines. But he did. That is more significant to me than what Jim Geraghty emphasizes, the inefficacy of Flynn’s suggestion. The suggestion was troubling simply because it was a new kind of suggestion, and the kind that it was.
To reflect on the unique nature of such things is more illuminating than trying to guess the odds of a military-backed Trump coup. Many presidents have abused executive authority, but at least they claimed constitutional justification and abused specific powers rather than throwing into chaos the question of who would wield all presidential power. Trump’s statement that his allegedly fraudulent removal from office would justify the “termination” of the Constitution is something different; he did not feel the need even to genuflect to the document. His attempt to retain office wrongly (as in fact it was) concerned nothing less than whether the people would be self-governing with respect to control of the presidency: whether the judgment of the polity was even to stand. More than mere episodes, these are new assumptions and new political practices — new assumptions, perhaps, about which political practices are even possible.
Thus does my concern go beyond, and even render secondary, the question of a Trump dictatorship. Not only could conduct like Trump’s help someone obtain a dictatorship someday, it damages our self-perception and character as a polity today. People have to think a certain way before dictatorship can become possible. Whether or not Trump would be a dictator, he gets people thinking in the right way for dictatorship. That is dangerous; it is also bad in itself.
Our system is a sum of people choosing to perform their roles — choosing, each, to follow the rules and fulfill his duties in respect of everyone else. It is only as good as the willingness of us all to keep doing that, from Congress to the judiciary to the cabinet to the military to state and local officialdom, and first and last to voters. The rules do not force us to keep following them, for in the deepest sense we are the rules, their authors and executors.
We do not often stop and ask whether to keep this constitutional democratic republic going. By way of any number of civic habits (presidential debates and “I voted” stickers and all the rest), the project imprints on us an almost instinctual reverence for its procedures. But Trump has weakened that instinct in a terrible many citizens. He has done this by attaching their political passions, and perhaps their social or personal or even religious identities, to his vainglorious project of repudiating the will of the voters and the public faith in voting itself. Along the way he has standardized political habits — such as a preference for bratty insult politics over reasoned and respectful conversation — that are harmful to the community and mutual understanding of citizens. In all this he has loosened, to a real if unmeasurable degree, the hold on the American soul of democratic constitutional republicanism and the virtues required for it.
As for the House’s current impeachment inquiry, if Biden were found to have accepted bribes or otherwise been corrupt, it would probably be less serious (though still impeachable) than the root offense that led to Trump’s first impeachment, namely his refusal to execute signed legislation unless what can plausibly be described as a favor was done for him. That already showed a willingness to disregard the Constitution’s architecture and lines of authority if doing so served his needs.
Regardless, the subversion of the transition of power that led to Trump’s second impeachment, and his implied and later admitted willingness to superordinate that subversion to the Constitution itself, belongs in a class of its own. To borrow a line from Nick Catoggio at the Dispatch, I cannot see it as “just another issue set to be weighed against other issue sets.” Objectively, that view is founded on a series of category errors. Subjectively it feels like a deep betrayal — as if by people who would force me to another country — at whatever point the errors cease to be errors merely.