Donald Trump is not acting like a dictator. And he’s not acting like a king. He’s governing as the executive — the position to which he was elected by a majority of voters. 

Yet with every decision President Trump makes, the left responds with claims that our very democracy is at risk. But, as is often the case, if you allow the ignorant to talk long enough, they shine a light on their stupidity — and their true motives. And with just a month into Trump’s second term, the left has fully revealed that their attacks are not aimed solely at the President, but also target the voters who elected him, proving President Trump is not the threat to democracy. They are.

Friday’s news that President Trump had fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, and other senior military officials, crystalized this reality. Soon after the announcement, politicians and pundits began pontificating on the supposed horror of the move.

“Dictators or wannabe kings fire general who don’t agree with their politics. This isn’t a banana republic,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., declared on X. “What Trump and Hegseth are doing is un-American, unpatriotic. It’s definition of politicizing our military, and we should expect to see loyalty oaths (not to the Constitution) and worse coming soon.”

Bill Kristol expanded on the theme in a Bulwark podcast with his fellow autocrat Sam Stein. “We try to explain the broader significance of replacing these senior military officers,” Kristol posted on X, saying, “Trump wants to break all institutional constraints at the power agencies, and secure personal fealty to him.”

The national security advisor under President Barack Obama, Susan Rice, likewise condemned the firing, framing it for CNN as an attack on the integrity of our democracy.  Under her telling of the firings, while “[w]e have civilian control” of the military, in exercising that control, “Donald Trump is bringing politics into the process of determining who should be our military leaders.”

“That is dangerous. It’s unprecedented. And it does not bode well for our integrity as a democracy,” the Democrat advisor pronounced.

Rice then added a further talking point — one prevalently paraded by those attacking Donald Trump: These officials “all take an oath to the Constitution of the United States. Not to any individual President or any individual leader.”

An oath to the Constitution of the United States, however, includes an oath to uphold Article II, which expressly provides “[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” 

By declaring “the” executive power “shall” be vested in “a President,” the Constitution commands fidelity to the president and when, and how, he decides to exercise those executive powers. Fidelity to the Constitution thus commands those within the executive branch of government to faithfully follow the lawful commands of the president.

A quick aside here is needed because the left often attempts to dilute the absolute authority of the executive by presenting nonsensical hypotheticals as a “gotcha” to supposedly disprove the constitutional duty of officials to obey the president. Of course, a military official is under no obligation to obey — and to the contrary has a duty to disobey — an order to seize the Capitol to allow a president to retain power after his term in office expires. Likewise, the FBI directed by a president to raid — without cause or warrant — the homes of political enemies would be compelled by the Constitution to disobey the executive.

But as the executive who for some four years sat merely as a ventriloquist’s dummy for the unknown officials running our government would say, “Come on, man.”

The left’s complaints are not that President Trump is acting beyond his executive authority, but that he is exercising the executive authority he possesses to implement his American First agenda. Doing so entails firing individuals who opposed his policy goals.

Ironically, in condemning Trump for the firings, his critics confirm the propriety of the terminations. Consider Kristol’s comments from Saturday: “It’s not about Brown, or Caine, or other individuals. It’s not about reforming DOD. What it’s about, at DOD and DOJ and the FBI and the intelligence community, is breaking all institutional resistance to Trump, and ensuring as much as is possible personal fealty to Trump.”

There should be no “institutional resistance to Trump.” That’s not how the Constitution works. Article II places in “a President,” “the executive Power.” It does not give any institution, Joint Chief, U.S. attorney, or any other bureaucrat the authority to either exercise executive power or to thwart it. So too, then, Article II commands fealty to President Trump as the holder of “the executive Power.”

The very acknowledgement that there is an “institutional resistance to Trump” in the DOD, DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community then confirms the righteousness of the firings. But it does more: It proves those touting the need for “institutional resistance” and the supposed independence in the executive branch are the opponents to democracy.

After all, the only member of the executive branch elected — and elected “by the entire nation” at that — is President Trump, which is why the Founders vested “the” executive power in “a President.” Because the president cannot alone manage the executive branch, he “select[s] those who [are] to act for him under his direction in the execution of the laws.” However, as the Supreme Court has stressed, such unelected officials hold “legitimacy and accountability” only “through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote.”

Declaring then that executive officials should maintain an independence from, or act as a resistance to, the president, represents a perversion to our Constitution and democracy by demanding executive authority be wrested from the unitary executive and gifted instead “to a person who answers to no one and for whom no one voted.”

Said otherwise, “[o]ur Constitution was adopted to enable the people to govern themselves, through their elected leaders.” A majority of voters elected Donald Trump, and thus members of the executive branch seeking to undermine the president are actually undermining the Constitution. And those condemning President Trump’s firings of such resistance officials are not attacking the executive — they are attacking our democracy.