The Tyrant Who Is Also A Joker
Gauging the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
Just how seriously are we supposed to take Donald Trump?
It’s been the central question of these past several years: whether Trump is tragedy or farce or some hideous combination of each. He talks like a dictator, acts like a mafia boss, and is straight out of central casting for the strongman who often emerges as democracies decline. But is he actually one? Or is this all cosplay? Since it is more likely than not that he is going to be president next January, it may be time to think this through one more time.
Here is, roughly, the case for taking him less seriously as a threat this time than in 2016. Looking back at my essay on the threat of tyranny eight years ago, I think the core analysis of democratic decline holds up, as does my diagnosis of Trump’s deranged psyche. But it behooves me to note that the specific Trump promises I found most alarmingly authoritarian were the following: his pledge to round up and deport all 11 million illegal immigrants; a ban on all Muslim immigrants; death threats to his political opponents; prosecution of Hillary Clinton; and a pledge to legalize torture in US warfare.
After four years in office, these fears — apart from the persistent rhetorical menacing of his opponents — were not borne out. He was bluffing, it turns out. On all the most substantive, authoritarian promises, he caved.
I also worried in that essay about some kind of national emergency that Trump could abuse to expand his power. One did actually occur on Trump’s watch: Covid. But his actual response was to expedite a vaccine, appoint Tony Fauci, and bitch, moan, pontificate absurdly, and dither. What Trump didn’t do was seize total power and assume all the weapons a national emergency could offer. A wannabe dictator would have jumped at the chance (see Trudeau, Justin).
I was also worried about a massive federal over-reaction after riots or urban unrest. Those fears were not absurd: when rioting did break out in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, Trump vowed to respond: “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
But the military did not intervene; looters were largely left alone or even celebrated by the woke left; several cities burned for days, even weeks. Even the most dramatic apparent example of Trump’s authoritarian bent — the clearing of Lafayette Square during the riots of 2020 — turned out to be a nothingburger. An internal report found that the reason the cops moved the Lafayette crowd was “so a contractor could install fencing.” Oh, and remember that massive military parade from Trump that was supposed to celebrate July 4 and turn us into a banana republic? Me neither. He conspicuously decided not to prosecute Clinton, despite “Lock Her Up” being a mainstay of his campaign. So I doubt he is really going to preside over the execution of General Mark Milley.
The two areas where Trump acted as badly as I feared were in defending himself from various legitimate investigations, where he revealed his contempt for the rule of law, even when it (partially) exonerated him; and his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he had telegraphed in advance. But notice what these two deeply anti-democratic actions had in common: they were not ways to impose his actual power on anyone; they were designed solely to protect his ego, to ensure he could never be seen as having lost. His narcissism is so extreme that he would sacrifice the entire republic just to sustain his own vision of being The Greatest of All Presidents.
January 6 brings all this together. Did he seriously think he was going to prevent certification, and remain as president? Seriously? Was it a genuine insurrection — an attempted coup, supported by a plurality in the country, secretly backed by rogue elements in the military and a majority in the Congress and the Court — that could have kept Trump in power? Or was it a coordinated but bizarre riot that got out of control, to support a coup based on a theory concocted by a bunch of fringe nutters, with no serious support from any other relevant actor?
To be honest, I think it’s somewhere in the middle of the two: a grotesque, disqualifying outrage against our democracy, and yet also pathetic, lame, and driven by Trump’s psychotic egotism — and cowardice. His decision not to march to the Capitol, despite promising to do so, is classic Trump. He’s a wimp, can’t deal with actual confrontation, fires people over Twitter, dodges primary debates, stays in his safe space of Truth Social, and will back down if you keep calling his bluff.
I know, I know. These reflections do not mean Trump is not a threat to democratic norms and legitimacy. You could buy all this and still regard him as utterly unfit for the office he held. I still do. In fact, there’s also a case for taking his danger to liberal democracy more seriously this time around than in 2016. As Jeff Greenfield explained in last week’s Dishcast, Trump has learned a few things since he was first elected, has actually consolidated his staggeringly strong grip on the Republican base and opportunistic elements of the elite, now knows where the weak spots in our constitutional system are, and will keep breaking the law in office (he can’t help himself) and thereby wreck what’s left of our democratic legitimacy, common discourse, and trust in the legal system.
He would essentially end the post-Watergate Justice Department, turning it into a personal revenge machine. He has effectively remade the Supreme Court. He has some serious wonks prepping the ideologues who are supposed to re-capture the bureaucracy from the current civil servants; his highly effective primary campaign is a sign of the professionalism that could conceivably inhabit a second Trump administration; and a victory in 2024 would provide a more decisive mandate than his first campaign — which was chaotic and improvised. That’s especially the case if Trump wins decisively, as is perfectly possible. And God knows what an emboldened, vengeful Trump would look like, with a more organized and unified GOP behind him.
My only cavil with this take is that I doubt professionalism of any kind will ever accompany a Trump administration — first or second term. That would require someone other than a manic psycho at the helm, and a bench of administrative talent that simply isn’t there. I’ve come to see Trump’s tyranny as psychological more than political, because he has neither the discipline nor the will to become a full-fledged strongman. He has the attention span of a TikTok tweenie. It’s far too much work to rule everyone’s lives — or build a wall — when all Trump really needs is constant adulation, and a constant feedback loop of himself “winning” on cable news. We’ve also discovered that he lacks a core feature for every tyrant: he doesn’t seem interested in launching wars. He even seems averse to them — unlike his GOP rival, the ghastly Nikki Haley, who makes Bill Kristol look like Pat Buchanan.
My fear of a second Trump term is thereby less crippling than my terror at the prospect of the first — because he seeks power only for his own psychological needs, because he is inherently incompetent, and because, at heart, he is a coward. And then there’s the question of his obvious trolling. What, for example, are we supposed to make of his bizarre statement that he intended to be a “dictator on Day One”? It was a joke! When asked to explain it, he said he meant he would “close the border” and “drill, baby, drill” on his first day in office and then act constitutionally. Neither of those requires dictatorial power, of course, and all of it was a comic trolling of Sean Hannity. It’s insane, of course, that we had a president who says things just to get a rise out of people. But it’s not the same as Hitlerian doggerel.
Of course, it’s a crisis that a mature democracy should be entertaining a candidate this dangerous, this unstable, and this malevolent. The very idea that we should be worried about any elected official effectively ending the rule of law, refusing to leave office, open to deploying violence on his behalf, and capable of daily, hourly, outbursts worthy of a mafia boss is a sign of how deep the rot has gone.
It’s going to be extremely hard for me to vote for Biden again this fall, given his appalling record on immigration, his aggressive race and sex discrimination, and his support for transing children. But Trump is not just a despicable human being. He is a completely unpredictable violator of constitutional and democratic norms. Even if he did fail to deliver on many of his authoritarian threats in his first term, that doesn’t mean we can be sure he won’t in his second. He may not be a new Mussolini, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t way outside the line for responsible government.
One final thing. Trump’s inability to concede an iota to his opponents, his fusion of truth and lies so that truth disappears entirely, and his daily doses of ever-intensifying polarization deeply corrode our liberal democracy. He has empowered the far left, because the moderate Democrats fear that any resistance to the woke will be tarred as being in league with Trump, thereby accelerating our descent into democratic dysfunction.
His demagogic genius is very real. He may be the most talented thug in American political history, which makes him ineluctably the most dangerous. And tyrants rarely mellow with time; their gambles tend to grow in ambition. And a victory for him would not just mean a threat to the rule of law; it would mean a democratic mandate for a president outside the law, and beyond morality. It would make the deep stain of 2016 permanent. It’s unthinkable.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my take on an epic Twitter fight over race and IQ; a conversation with Jonathan Freedland on anti-Semitism and the left; six notable quotes from the week in news; 21 pieces we recommend on Substack on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a winter time-lapse; a striking view of Seattle and Mt Rainier; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a re-subscriber:
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Another who rejoined the Dish:
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Race, IQ, And Twitter
I don’t participate on Twitter, aka X, anymore. I gave it up last year because it brought out the worst in me, and did nothing to generate traffic for the Dish. But I still peruse it for stories I might miss, controversies that might add some light to some issue, and Pet Shop Boys updates.
This week has seen an epic fight between Steve Sailer and Will Stancil, on the mounds of data showing persistent, non-trivial gaps in IQ among various racial groups.
(Read the whole piece here, for paid subscribers.)
New On The Dishcast: Jonathan Freedland
Jonathan writes a column for The Guardian, hosts their “Politics Weekly America” podcast, and is the co-host of the “Unholy” podcast with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He’s also the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on “white supremacy” shifting to “Jewish supremacy,” and a character study of Keir Starmer. That link also takes you to commentary on our episode with Jeff Greenfield on Trump and political history. Readers also discuss my essay on Saltburn and my sparring with Ari Melber on Real Time last Friday.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Justin Brierley on his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief of God, Nate Silver on the 2024 race, Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Correction Of The Week
We didn’t get any dissents over my essay on Saltburn and Oxford, but a reader writes:
“Carey Mulligan gives us something between an episode of Absolutely Fabulous and a Richard Burton flick.” Do you mean Tim Burton and his wild-haired oddballs? (And I love Richard — yes, I am very old.)
Yes. Tim! I meant Tim! A brain-fart. Thanks for the correction. As always, keep them — and the dissents — coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the NH primary, the border battle between Biden and Texas, and whether the right or left is more guilty of “book banning.” Below are some examples:
The lab-leak theory gets ever closer to reality.
Are the feds getting close to removing cannabis from Schedule I?
Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork are kaput, and the LA Times is flailing, but “the long tail of media is thriving,” observes Simon Owens. The Dish sure is.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
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The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. One writes, “I asked DALL-E to produce a picture of a VFYW sleuth sleuthing”:
See you next Friday.