The people convinced that Donald Trump will be a dictator are passing around this video of Trump saying he’d keep New Hampshire as the first primary “as long as I have anything to say about it, and . . . we have a good chance saying for four years, have a lot to say about it, four years and beyond.”
This is yet another wade into a familiar situation: Trump, tongue planted at least partly in cheek, serves up a word salad that can be read as a statement that he wishes or intends to do something the laws and norms of a democratic republic don’t permit. We had a similar example when Sean Hannity asked him for reassurance that he wouldn’t abuse power, and Trump said he wouldn’t do so “except for Day One. . . . No, no, no, other than Day One. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.” There are other famous examples, like when Trump — in a public speech in 2016 — only half-seriously begged Vladimir Putin to release Hillary Clinton’s emails. In each case, you could take one of three positions:
- Closely parse Trump’s words and note that he has not, in fact, literally said he would do something illegal. Former presidents can have a lot of influence for more than four years. Executive orders on domestic policy are quasi-dictatorial powers, and using them for one day is something candidates of both parties routinely pledge to do.
- Take Trump entirely seriously and say he’s essentially admitting his desire to be a dictator, president for life, etc.
- Just dismiss this as Trump joking around.
As usual with Trump, there’s a grain of truth in all three, but also a high chance of getting egg on your face either way. Trump loves to say ambiguous things and induce his apologists to explain them away, only to then come right out and say, “Yes, I meant it.” (He plainly loves watching Hannity cringe and squirm when he pitches a softball question and Trump refuses to give the easy answer.) Trump also loves to say outrageous things that enrage his opponents, and then not actually do them. What we should not underestimate is the corrosive nature of how Trump uses trolling humor to introduce ideas into the bloodstream of American political discourse through jocular statements that give him deniability while shifting the Overton Window of what things are thinkable to discuss from a presidential podium. His everything-is-negotiable ethos encourages him to think of everything he says as a trial balloon that can be advanced or abandoned later as needed, without committing himself.
Jokes that are literally false can work in politics if they are telling a fundamental truth, as I have noted before: “If Trump said at a rally that Biden was 400 years old, that would be a joke in the tradition of political jokes — it tells a political truth (Biden is really old) in terms that are literally false (Biden is not actually 400 years old), but it’s not a lie, it’s a humorous exaggeration. The audience knows it’s an exaggeration, so they laugh at the joke, but they also get the point.” But when Trump does this sort of thing, it’s not that crazy for people to suspect that maybe he does mean to tell a truth about his intentions and desires.
Politically, it’s possible to be deft enough to make this sort of thing work as a way of playing rope-a-dope to induce your enemies to make fools of themselves, but Trump’s record of behavior by this point has made it yet another of his self-defeating habits. The natural reaction when the leader jokes about going way too far is that it gets opponents worked up into a frenzy, while supporters laugh yet also enjoy the frisson of something naughty being suggested. That can make your opponents look unhinged, but only if persuadable people think it is actually crazy to suggest that you would act like this. Voters knew, for example, that Ronald Reagan wasn’t actually announcing that he would start nuking the Soviet Union in ten minutes. But after you’ve tried so strenuously to overturn an election that your supporters stormed the Capitol and chanted about hanging the vice president, people who hear these quotes thirdhand through hostile sources are apt to take them both literally and seriously. And when they do, it doesn’t matter if your fans thought it was funny.