Trump 2.0 might be a disaster, but it will not be a dictatorship

Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity he would be dictator only on ‘day one’. Picture: AFP

Last week Donald Trump twice declined to say he would not abuse power if he were re-elected president.

Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s biggest media backers, gave the former president the opportunity to dismiss his critics’ claims that he would be a “dictator”.

“Do you have any plans whatsoever if re-elected to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?” Hannity asked him on Thursday.

Trump didn’t answer and changed the subject. Flabbergasted, Hannity asked the question again after a commercial break. This time Trump said he would be dictator only on “day one”.

Trump’s critics exaggerate the danger he poses to conventional US governance, but these were worrying, and politically inept, answers given the reservations many Americans have about the wisdom of a second Trump presidency. After all, Trump often declares himself to be the “retribution” candidate, promising to seek revenge on his perceived enemies within the federal government if re-elected.

That said, his critics have become hysterical as the former president tightens his grip on the Republican nomination and consistently bests Joe Biden in the polls.

Former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill recently said Trump was “more dangerous than Hitler and Mussolini”.

The Economist last month declared Trump posed the “biggest danger to the world in 2024”.

“Could a Trump presidency turn into a dictatorship?” asked Robert Kagan in The Washington Post earlier this month, one of many similar op-eds gracing the pages of major US newspapers in recent weeks.

High-profile anchor Rachel Maddow in October said Trump would “put MSNBC on trial for treason so he can execute us”. The Atlantic magazine has just published an entire issue on how a Trump presidency would be a disaster for the climate, LGBTQ rights, NATO, women and science, among other things. Republican Chris Christie, whose anti-Trump candidacy has so far failed, even blamed Trump for the rise of anti-Semitism across the US.

Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, said on CNN this weekend a second Trump term would spell “the end of American democracy”.

They all need to take a deep breath. A second Trump presidency might be a disaster, but it won’t be a dictatorship. Trump had four years to try to become a dictator and didn’t. Americans take their rigid rules-based constitution very seriously.

Power is highly decentralised across the three branches of government, and the 50 US states, which have their own constitutions and whose governors and police forces don’t answer to the president. (There’s also that small problem of more than 430 million guns in civilian hands, making any attempt to sustain a dictatorship more difficult.)

Most importantly, it’s unlikely the US military, fundamental to any successful coup, would go along with any dictatorship. Officers swear an oath of allegiance to the US constitution, promising to obey only presidential orders consistent with it.

Even Trump’s own choice for chairman of the joint chiefs, Mark Milley, recently said he would have thwarted any orders from President Trump to deploy the military domestically.

And no president is any match for the CIA and FBI, least of all Trump, who is largely loathed by those two powerful agencies. Indeed, Trump was too scared to release even the final JFK assassination files for fear of upsetting the CIA.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Democrat senator Chuck Schumer observed in 2017.

Finally, the events of January 6, 2021 showed the US constitution and conventional governance proved highly resilient to massive riots and White House pressure to delay the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Any warnings that Trump will become a dictator are not only ridiculous, but probably counter-productive for Trump’s opponents: the clear exaggerations only convince his supporters that the mainstream media is egregiously biased against him. Self-evidently, these attacks haven’t worked. Trump has been the favourite, currently overwhelmingly so, to become the next president in political betting markets since October.

Trump is known for his exaggeration, bravado and bluster, but few ordinary Americans take him literally, and his supporters know feigned shock when they see it.

To be sure, a second Trump presidency would not be a sedate affair, notwithstanding the possibility Trump could be sentenced to jail next year over any of his 91 indictments about to creep through the legal system.

For a start, Trump’s desire to significantly weaken the federal career civil service by ensuring all staff can be sacked by the White House (as opposed to only the most senior officials) could elicit mass strikes or lay-offs.

Trump is far from the ideal presidential candidate, but he has tapped into the widespread frustration of a large minority of Americans with the policies and style of the two major political parties.

That’s what he meant back in 2016 when he famously said he could shoot someone on 5th Ave in Manhattan and not lose any votes. The parties’ failure to produce a concentration of better, younger candidates has fuelled Trump’s political rise, and possible comeback.

There are many reasons to criticise Trump’s second bid for the White House: the failures from his first term, the excessive focus on himself, or a lack of policy detail (he floated abolishing so-called Obamacare last week without an alternative). But him becoming a dictator is not one of them.