Talks about a Trump dictatorship burden the American political debate

When a historian wrote an essay Recently, one of Mr. Trump’s allies warned that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to a dictatorship. One of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.

It almost sounds like a parody: the answer to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not doing their best to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the accusation of dictatorship. At least it looks like they’re leaning into it.

If Mr. Trump returns to office, people close to him have vowed to “go after” the news media, open criminal investigations into former aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of officials seen as disloyal considered. When critics said Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “pests” matched that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new administration Trump.

Trump himself did little to reassure Americans when his friend Sean Hannity tried to help him on Fox News last week. At a town-hall-style meeting, Mr. Hannity threw an apparent softball by asking Mr. Trump to reaffirm that he obviously had no intention of abusing his power and using the government to punish enemies. Rather than simply agreeing, Trump said he would not be dictator until “Day 1” of a new term.

“Trump has made it crystal clear through all his actions and rhetoric that he admires leaders who have forms of authoritarian power, from Putin to Orban to Xi, and that he wants to exercise that kind of power at home,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat. , author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” referring to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Xi Jinping of China. “History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do,” she added. “We don’t listen until it’s too late.”

Talks about the possible authoritarian quality of a new Trump presidency have permeated the political conversation in the nation’s capital in recent days. A series of reports in The New York Times outlined several plans developed by Trump’s allies to assert enormous power during a new term, and detailed how he would be less constrained by constitutional guardrails. The Atlantic published a special issue with 24 contributions predicting what a second Trump presidency will be like look like, and many of them depict an autocratic regime.

Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming and vice chair of the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, published a new book warning that Trump is a clear and present danger for American democracy. And of course it was the historian’s essayRobert Kagan, in The Washington Post, who pushed Senator JD Vance, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, to pressure the Justice Department to investigate.

It is fair to say that American presidents have increased their power and have been called dictators since the early days of the republic. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, were all accused of despotism. Richard M. Nixon is said to have consolidated power in the “Imperial Presidency.” George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both compared to Hitler.

But there is something different about the debate now, more than overheated rhetoric or legitimate disagreements over the limits of executive power, something that signals a fundamental decision point in the American experiment. Perhaps it is an expression of popular disillusionment with American institutions; Only 10 percent of Americans think democracy works very well, according to a June poll by the American newspaper The Washington Post Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Perhaps it is a reflection of the extremism and demagoguery that is becoming increasingly common in politics in many places around the world. And perhaps it stems from a former president trying to reclaim his old office and demonstrating a startling affinity for and even envy for autocrats.

Mr. Trump once expressed no regret for a quote he shared on social media came from Mussolini and adopted Stalin’s language by calling journalists the “enemies of the people.” He told this to his chief of staff ‘Hitler did many good things’ and later he said I wish American generals were like Hitler’s generals.

Last December, shortly after opening his comeback campaign, Mr. Trump called for an “termination” of the Constitution to immediately impeach Mr. Biden and reinstall himself in the White House without waiting for new elections.

The former president’s defenders dismiss fears of Trump’s autocratic instincts as whining from liberals who don’t like him and his policies and are unfairly trying to scare voters. They argue that President Biden is the real dictator because his Justice Department is prosecuting his most likely challenger next year for several alleged crimes, even though there is no evidence that Mr. Biden was personally involved in those decisions or even of some former Trump advisers . call the charges legitimate.

“The dictator talk of Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans, not just to distract them from the Biden administration’s failures and weakness, but because of something they fear even more : that a second Trump administration will be far away. more successful at implementing his agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first,” Fred Fleitz, who briefly served in the Trump White House, wrote about American greatness website on Friday.

Mr. Kagan, a widely respected Brookings Institution scholar and author of numerous history books, has a long record of support for a muscular foreign policy that hardly strikes many on the left as liberal. But he has been a strong and outspoken critic of Trump for years. In May 2016, as other Republicans reconciled to Mr. Trump’s first nomination for president, Mr. Kagan warned that “This is how fascism comes to America.”

His essay of November 30 once again sounded the alarm. Mr. Trump may have been thwarted in his first term by more conventional Republican advisers and military officers in pushing some of his more radical ideas, Mr. Kagan argued, but he will no longer surround himself with such figures and face fewer checks have to deal with. and balances that limited him last time.

Mr. Kagan cited, among other things, Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn an election he lost, ignoring the will of the voters. And he noted Trump’s open discussion of prosecuting opponents and sending the military into the streets to quell protests. “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively safe in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship,” Mr. Kagan wrote.

Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who enlisted Mr. Trump’s support and did so Listed last week by Axios as a possible vice presidential running mate next year took offense on behalf of the former president. He sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open rebellion,” seizing on a point in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that by Democratic-led states could defy a President Trump.

Mr. Vance wrote that “according to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is dire enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would invariably follow.”

Kagan’s piece did not actually advocate rebellion, but simply foretold the possibility that Democratic governors would oppose Trump “through some form of destruction” of federal authority. He then suggested that Republican governors could do the same with Mr. Biden, which he also did not advocate.

But Mr. Vance tried to draw a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Under the Justice Department’s logic in prosecuting Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article could be interpreted as “an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ an expression of a criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to cause a civil war.” To make his point, he insisted on answers before January 6.

Mr. Kagan, who followed his essay with another one on Thursday on how to stop the shift toward dictatorship he sees, said the senator’s intervention confirmed his point. “It’s revealing that their first instinct when attacked by a journalist is to suggest they be locked up,” Kagan noted in an interview.

Aides to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance did not respond to requests for comment. David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, defended Mr. Kagan’s work. “We are proud to publish Robert Kagan’s thoughtful essays, and we encourage the public to read both his Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 pieces together — and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “These essays are part of a long Kagan tradition of starting important conversations.”

It is a conversation that still has months to go with an uncertain outcome. In the meantime, no one expects Mr. Garland to take Mr. Vance seriously, or almost certainly Mr. Vance either. His letter was a political statement. But it says something about the era when proposing the prosecution of a critic would be seen as a political win.