Opinion: Would Trump be a dictator in a second term? No, but he would be a disaster

Opinion by William Cooper

(CNN) — Many thought leaders seem to be terrified that America will plunge into a dictatorship if Donald Trump is reelected in 2024. Writing in The Washington Post recently, leading foreign policy scholar Robert Kagan warned: “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.” According to former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, one of “the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”

Trump himself is on the bandwagon, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday night that he would be a dictator, though only on “day one” of his presidency. “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling,” he said. “After that I’m not a dictator.” Last month, he used the rhetoric of history’s worst dictators against his political opponents, vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

The widespread fear that Trump will actually be a dictator, however, is misplaced. If Trump wins the 2024 election, American democracy might be suspended, at least temporarily. But it won’t be replaced by a dictatorship, which is a coherent and recognizable system of government. Instead, if Trump wins, my view is that American democracy will be replaced by American “chaosracy” — an incoherent, volatile and unpredictable mix of some government institutions that function democratically and some that don’t.

Trump falsely claimed he won the 2020 election; if he wins in 2024, then America’s president will likely be at war with the central premise of American democracy: that free and fair elections determine who runs the government. Trump might use his presidential powers to thwart elections and undermine the Constitution. American democracy, in its contemporary form, could be suspended until a new president who respects and adheres to the Constitution takes back the White House.

But if Trump wins, he won’t become a dictator. A dictator dictates the workings of government. Merriam Webster defines a dictator as “one holding complete autocratic control: a person with unlimited governmental power.” This is what Trump will want to achieve. But he won’t get anywhere near “complete autocratic control” over American government.

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor recently cited several examples of tactics many people think Trump would use to become a dictator: “As my colleagues have reported over the past year, Trump has made clear his stark, authoritarian vision for a potential second term. He would embark on a wholesale purge of the federal bureaucracy, weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents (something he claims is being done to him), stack government agencies across the board with political appointees prescreened as ideological Trump loyalists, and dole out pardons to myriad officials and apparatchiks as incentives to do his bidding or stay loyal.”

There’s a simple problem with these prognostications: Trump can’t actually do these things. The presidential pardon power isn’t broad enough to preemptively immunize widespread criminal activity; political appointees must be confirmed by a majority of the Senate (which would reject Trump’s worst co-conspirators); and the majority of federal officials serve across presidential administrations in a large, powerful and entrenched bureaucracy.

The federal bureaucracy can’t simply be “purged.” Valid federal legislation authorizes and funds government agencies — and powerful unions protect their workers — so the courts won’t allow federal employees to be fired en masse absent duly enacted legislation. Republican presidents have long tried to shrink the administrative state. They’ve failed miserably.

The Department of Justice moreover, didn’t go after Trump’s enemies the last time he was president. To the contrary, the department rejected Trump’s demands to prosecute former President Barack Obama, then-former Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others.

The Justice Department did, however, prosecute many of Trump’s friends. Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and threatening a witness. Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017 and asked to withdraw his guilty plea in 2020. Steve Bannon was charged with defrauding investors in his campaign to build a wall at the southern border. Paul Manafort was convicted of tax fraud. And Tom Barrack was acquitted at trial of foreign lobbying charges.

Trump eventually pardoned Flynn, Bannon, Stone and Manafort. But the Department of Justice’s lawyers had zealously prosecuted these men.

To imprison his enemies, Trump would need grand juries to indict on his command, courts to rule in his favor and juries to render his chosen verdicts.

The president of the United States doesn’t have power over these things. Grand juries operate under the supervision of the federal courts, not the executive branch. Federal judges sit for life subject to impeachment from Congress. And the only authorities with the power to affect a jury verdict are the trial judge and the appellate courts.

Trump-appointed judges, all confirmed by a majority of the Senate, have shifted the federal courts sharply to the right. But they have also shown their independence and ruled against Trump repeatedly. The Supreme Court allowed a New York prosecutor to receive Trump’s tax returns, denied Trump’s effort to end DACA and rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The Senate, furthermore, still has to confirm, by majority vote, all executive-level presidential appointments (including at the Department of Justice). Trump can’t just appoint, for example, Rudy Guliani as attorney general, Steve Bannon as secretary of defense or Michael Flynn as secretary of state. And pardons only apply to federal offenses, offer no protection under state law and may be voided in court if they are preemptive and not specific. They are hardly a license to go about committing major crimes. Just look at Bannon, who was pardoned by Trump in his border wall case and later convicted for refusing to cooperate with the January 6 committee in Congress.

Unlike a dictator, Trump wouldn’t control most government activity — at the federal, state or local level. If the Democrats take the House in 2024, would Trump control how they vote on legislation? Would he force state court judges to govern how he wants them to? Local school boards?

No way. To be a dictatorship, people have to actually do the things the dictator says. Given his historic unpopularity ratings, the resistance to a second Trump term will likely be fierce at every level of government.

The one way Trump could actually achieve a dictatorship is if he commandeered the military to use force — or its threat — throughout the country on his behalf. But there’s no reason whatsoever to think he could pull that off. Trump has long had strained relations with military leaders, including his secretaries of defense John Mattis and Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

As we saw with Milley — who actively opposed Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 presidential election results — military leaders won’t just obey Trump’s illegal initiatives. The military doesn’t “take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” Milley said in his departing speech last September. “We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America — and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

The idea that the military would help Trump conquer all of American government and become a dictator is, frankly, absurd.

Thus, if Trump wins in 2024 there would be neither American democracy nor American dictatorship. There would, instead, be American “chaosracy.” American government would likely descend into chaos.

Trump would have an ironclad grip on some things, such as international diplomacy and statehouses dominated by his loyalists. He would have some control in other areas, such as executive branch policies and initiatives. And he’d have little to no control over everything else, such as the daily workings of the state courts and Democrat-run state governments.

Where he had control, he would do harm. Where he did not, he would face resistance.

The sum total of this explosive mixture would be very dangerous, especially internationally, where sober and rational American leadership is essential. As former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote recently in a Foreign Affairs essay, “The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them.”

This dynamic would get exponentially worse if Trump were back in the saddle.

The last thing America or the world needs is a return to Trump’s me-first, reality-television-inspired brand of belligerent and incoherent foreign policy, so there’s lots to be worried about if Trump wins.

To be sure, he could deeply poison the body politic. He could trash the Constitution. He could break the law. He could go after his enemies. And he could destabilize the international order.

But he would not be a dictator. Not even close.

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