The U.S. conservative movement's authoritarian plans

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In his own words
“2024 is the final battle,” Donald Trump has said.

“Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country,” he has argued.

“Our country,” he has said, “is going to hell.”

As he campaigns to reclaim the presidency, Trump has intensified his rhetoric of cataclysm and apocalypse, beyond even the tenor of his previous two campaigns. He has claimed that “the blood-soaked streets of our once great cities are cesspools of violent crimes” and that Americans are living in “the most dangerous time in the history of our country.”

More specifically, he has promised to use the powers of the federal government to punish people he perceives to be his critics and opponents, including the Biden family, district attorneys, journalists and “the deep state.” He has suggested that Mark Milley, a retired top general, deserves the death penalty. Trump has called President Biden “an enemy of the state” and Nancy Pelosi “the Wicked Witch.” He has accused former President Barack Obama — “Barack Hussein Obama,” in Trump’s telling — of directing Biden to admit “terrorists and terrorist sympathizers” into the U.S.

Trump’s threats, often justified with lies, are deeply alarming, historians and legal experts say. He has repeatedly promised to undermine core parts of American democracy. He has also signaled that, unlike in his first term in the White House, he will avoid appointing aides and cabinet officials who would restrain him.

Many Americans have heard only snippets of Trump’s promises. He tends to make them on Truth Social, his niche social media platform, or at campaign events, which have received less media coverage than they did when he first ran for president eight years ago. Yet there is reason to believe that Trump means what he says.

“He’s told us what he will do,” Liz Cheney, a member of Congress until her criticism of Trump led to her defeat in a Republican primary, told John Dickerson of CBS News this past weekend. “People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted.”

Not simply policy
I understand why many Americans would like to tune out — or deny — the risks facing our democracy. I also understand why many voters are frustrated with the status quo and find Trump’s anti-establishment campaign appealing.

Incomes, wealth and life expectancy have been stagnant for decades for millions of people. The Covid pandemic and its aftermath contributed to a rise in both inflation and societal disorder. School absenteeism has risen sharply. The murder rate and homelessness have both increased. Undocumented immigration has soared during Biden’s presidency.

But it’s worth being clear about what Trump is promising to do. He isn’t merely calling for policy solutions that some Americans support and others oppose. He is promising to undo foundations of American democracy and to rule as authoritarians in other countries have. He is also leading the race for the Republican nomination by a wide margin, and running even with, or slightly ahead of, Biden in general election polls.

Today’s newsletter is the first of several in coming months meant to help you understand what a second Trump presidency would look like. For starters, I recommend that you read what Trump is saying in his own words. My colleagues Ian Prasad Philbrick and Lyna Bentahar have been tracking his campaign appearances and social media posts, and have compiled a list of his most extreme statements.

I also recommend an ongoing series of Times stories by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, which previews a potential second Trump presidency. Among the subjects: legal policy, immigration and the firing of career government employees. The most recent story looks at why he is more likely to achieve his aims in a second term than he was in his first.

“So many of the guardrails that existed to stop him are gone or severely weakened,” Maggie told me. “That includes everything from internal appointees to a changed Congress, where he has outlasted his few Republican critics there.”

What democracy needs
The new issue of The Atlantic magazine is devoted to this subject as well, with 24 writers imagining a second Trump term. “Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces — when convenient — certain conservative ideas,” Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes. “We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish.” The problem, Goldberg explains, is that Trump is “an antidemocratic demagogue.”

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I agree with Goldberg about the value of both conservative and liberal ideas, and that I find it uncomfortable to write about the likely nominee of a major party in such harsh terms. In 2024, we will also cover Biden’s record and campaign with appropriate skepticism.

But it would be wishful thinking to portray Trump as anything other than antidemocratic. He keeps telling the country what he intends to do if he returns to the White House in 2025. It’s worth listening.

In 2016, when the once-preposterous idea of President Donald Trump looked increasingly possible, many commentators — not only on the left, but on the anti-Trump center-right — warned that Trump’s election victory could become an “extinction-level event” for American democracy. Today, after four years of Trump and three years of a Joe Biden presidency, another Trump victory seems distinctly possible, with many polls showing him with a small lead over Biden. Should we be very afraid — and of what?

Some political analysts speculate that to many Americans, Trump in 2023 seems far less of a menace than Trump in 2016: We already had a Trump presidency, and the sky didn’t fall. Yes, almost 351,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in Trump’s last year in the Oval Office, but the pandemic also killed huge numbers of people in other countries that were not led by Trump.

Others argue — much more sensibly, in my view — that our past experience with a President Trump term confirms the danger. Above all, after Jan. 6, 2021, we know for certain the answer to a question that was first raised in 2016: whether the notoriously egomaniacal Trump would accept a defeat at the polls. Not only does he still refuse to accept his loss in 2020, he tried to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power through a de facto coup attempt that included junk lawsuits, state-level pressure to appoint rogue electors, and finally a mob assault on Capitol Hill. In a Colorado lawsuit that accuses him of being an insurrectionist, his defense rests on the claim that he didn’t swear an oath to “support” the Constitution of the United States — only to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.

Trump detractors also say that a second Trump term is likely to be far more dangerous than the first because, having learned from the experience of being stymied by civil servants and administration officials bound to legal and institutional norms, he is likely to appoint rabid loyalists and zealots who will carry out even illegal or immoral orders.

Can Trump be stopped by the “checks and balances” of our political system? Veteran conservative journalist and colleague Mona Charen throws some cold water on this hope. She points out that the Republican Party has abdicated its responsibility to curb Trump, the Democratic Party is too weak and handicapped by its own internal conflicts, and the press is mired in partisan polarization. Charen acknowledges that the military is likely to refuse to follow illegal orders, and the courts are still largely committed to upholding the law. But those guardrails are growing dangerously brittle.

Could Trump become an actual autocrat or dictator? That still seems unlikely in a country with 50 state governments and a population in which the majority would reject autocracy. A more likely scenario is that the return of the GOP’s clown prince may trigger domestic political struggles at unprecedented levels, with different public institutions openly at war with each other. From there, it’s one step to chaos and institutional collapse. A second Trump term does not spell inevitable doom for American democracy. But it will be a new and riskier round in a dangerous experiment.

In a Colorado lawsuit that accuses him of being an insurrectionist, his defense rests on the claim that he didn’t swear an oath to “support” the Constitution of the United States — only to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.