DAY ONE DICTATORSHIP

The darkest truth about 2024 is that something around 50% of voters will choose Trump. While some may do so as a childish protest vote against assorted, random “culture war” issues, a significant number will vote for Trump precisely because they want what he promises America.

As Ben Wittes put it in the New Year’s edition of his Dog Shirt Daily newsletter, “By this time next year, American democracy will either be ending or will have dealt a dramatic blow to its foes. It's Götterdämmerung in Trump's war against the world's most powerful office.”

Remember that Trump was, in fact, defeated at the polls in 2020, and he attempted to overturn that result. He would have had the same reaction had he lost in 2016 and he will have the same reaction when he loses in 2024. How do we know? He’s told us each time that the only election result he would accept was his victory, and he refused when asked to say he would accept the result otherwise. There is no reason to believe that he will accept any democratic verdict that does not put him back into power.

The forces that support Trump to subvert and overthrow important features of our constitutional democratic republic are stronger than they were in January 2021.

Donald Trump said in an interview with Sean Hannity that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office. He has repeated the statement, with several of his posts on Truth (anti)Social, and at campaign rallies.

He means it.

He proudly boasted that a second Trump term will bring “revenge” and “dictatorship.” He has vowed to shoot shoplifters, impose the death penalty on drug dealers. He has boasted about searching for, rounding up, and deporting millions of undocumented migrants who he says are e “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Your fear of his return to office is warranted.

The threat to a democratic constitutional republic, in which government actions are subject to the rule of law is real and existential. The United States could realistically cease to be a democratic country. Quickly. As quickly as Germany ceased to be a democratic country in 1933.

We have already been reclassified as a “flawed democracy;” our peers on that list are nations like Poland, Brazil, and Israel rather than Canada, Japan, or Norway.

Rather than the “rule of law,” Trump promises “rule by law,” using the Department of Justice as a weapon against his political opponents. He claims this has already happened, which is why he faces 91 felony indictments. In rule by law systems, the evidence doesn’t matter. The person, not the crime, is persecuted rather than prosecuted.

A review of the Trump campaign’s plans and messaging shows what that may mean: Trump’s “Agenda47" - the closest thing he has presented to an actual “platform” to run on - includes a sweeping list day-one executive orders that are directly aimed at remaking the Constitution and the federal government as we know it.

Once these are in place and being carried out, he can call himself whatever he wants - like Caesar Augustus, who never allowed himself to be called anything but First Tribune, regardless of the reality that he was the Emperor.

What distinguishes the planned Trump Executive Orders from the kind of EO’s normally issued on the first day in office by previous presidents is the ambition of what is in them.

Trump plans to issue Executive Orders that will end birthright citizenship, give him the authority to fire tens of thousands of federal civil servants, and force federal bureaucrats to obey culture war dictates in their actions.

The Trump campaign describes the proposal to end birthright citizenship by saying they’ve already arrived at the “correct interpretation” of the 14th Amendment. Under that interpretation, the children of undocumented immigrants and tourists would no longer receive citizenship. Federal agencies would be ordered to stop issuing passports, social security numbers, and other markers of citizenship under the order.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Trump said “They must go back,” referring to the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States.

The order would be “unprecedented” in its use of executive power, with the White House proclaiming - literally by fiat - a new interpretation of the Constitution. This has never, ever, been even contemplated in previous administrations.

Such an order, and many of the others, will spark court fights that will set up legal battles over bedrock issues of constitutional law that will be decided by a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, in which half that majority were appointed to their positions by Trump.

Agenda47 lists several other culture war executive orders as well.

One would ban gender transition education in federal agencies.

Another would ban “ESG investments” in financial planning.

Another would reverse a Biden executive order promoting diversity.

A proposal originally presented by the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 is a ban on government programs supporting the teaching of “critical race theory.”

The broadened version of the Schedule F Executive Order that he signed at the end of his term in office in late 2020 would give him the power to fire any federal civil servant with policymaking responsibilities for any reason; this is a category that reaches into the tens of thousands. It is framed as a plan to “shatter the deep state,” an explicitly political undertaking.

The result would be the mass exodus of professionals., which would result in a swift decapitation of the operations of several government agencies.

Another day-one executive order calls for reinterpretation of the 1974 Congressional Budget Control and Impoundment Act, which - among other things - mandates that the executive branch use funding allocated by the legislative. Trump ran afoul of this law in 2019 when he withheld money Congress allocated to Ukraine as part of a political extortion scheme to coerce Kyiv into damaging Joe Biden. In other words, whatever budget Congress passed would be subject to modification according to Trump’s whims of the moment.

Another proposed order, originally developed by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025, would gut the Environmental Protection Administration by requiring reconsideration of the agency’s structure for fulfilling its mission to “create a better environmental tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities.” Say good-bye to efforts to deal with climate change, replaced by policies ensuring environmental destruction and possibly the extinction of life as we know it on the planet.

Trump has also promised to bring back an expanded travel ban on Muslim countries and a refusal to allow any migrants who are not “Christian” to enter the country.

Unfortunately, there is more evidence that invoking “democracy,” might not be enough to save the Republic

In a second Trump Administration, elections will likely become significantly less competitive than they are already through the role of money in politics, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, the tools the Republican Party uses to hold power. Trump is gearing up to make these flaws look comparatively harmless. If he wins, there will be a systematic, organized push to ensure that election officials are loyalists not to democracy, but to Trump.

While elections won’t end, fully competitive elections will die. Once elections are undermined, there is no longer an easy mechanism to restore democracy; the system keeps deteriorating, as can be seen today in Hungary and Turkey.

Trump has also threatened to go after press outlets that criticize him, raising the possibility that the United States will go will go after a “mainstream media” that increasingly fears the financial costs or state persecution that comes with taking on the Trump administration.

These forces, mixed with ascendant Christian nationalism in the Republican party, create a dangerous mix.

Internationally, we will no longer be on the side of the people of Ukraine; we will be on the side of the dictator who wants to destroy them. The international consequences of such a choice will be severe. Trump has promised to leave NATO, which will destroy it as an organization. Europe will be left to make whatever deal they can with Putin, which the policies Trump will pursue will lead to a series of foreign policy changes that will allow Putin reshape the world according to his desires, all while giving counterfeit democracies like Hungary and Turkey the message that the United States no longer remotely cares about global democracy.

Democracy cannot survive where voters don’t experience a shared reality. We’re already there, which is why what seemed to be a government and society that could successfully deal with whatever came is now seen as being so fragile and precarious.

A significant segment of the American people is no longer swayed by fact-based truth. There are millions who now believe “nothing is true and everything is possible,” the form of fictional relativism that allows authoritarianism to thrive through whataboutism, the friend of autocrats. .

Hannah Arendt explained this 60 years ago:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

It leads to the world we living in, one where an authoritarian’s cult following can never be convinced to change their minds and desert their leader, as she described:

“…one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

This year, we are going to find out whether Trumpism is still a powerful movement that can threaten the constitutional republic; whether it will achieve control and destroy our democratic institutions.

American democracy is on the ballot in November.

It’s not Biden’s age, or Harris’ likeability, or whether this or that program or policy that you strongly believe in has been tossed aside. It has nothing to do with the price of Cheerios in the supermarket.

It’s about whether you can have an argument over policy differences without the loser paying the price of going to prison.

It only takes one day to establish a dictatorship.

2024 is the most important year in the life of everyone in this country. Your support of That’s Another Fine Mess as a paid subscriber is important. It’s only $7/month or $70/year, saving $14.

Comments are for paid subscribers.