If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’d bring a better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers, and a more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries.
by David Frum
For
all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when
turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the
familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of
severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know
that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot
believe they might happen tomorrow.
When Donald Trump is the
subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the
normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political
behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even
when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced
one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that
previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy
survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?
In his first
term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance
and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better
understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in
tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his
adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another
Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would
lie ahead.
By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the
thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may
already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the
election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon
on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United
States will be a perjury.
A second Trump term would instantly
plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than
anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s,
even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional
government with the president as its head. But the government cannot
function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The
president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For
his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
From
Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second
Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and
state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect
those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3)
Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and
critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal
officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these
lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military
to crush them.
A restored Trump would lead the United States into
a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump
nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the
president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the
Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the
military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?
The
existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal
maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for
federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his
pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that
matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office
and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the
attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would
surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of
the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a
huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a
second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to
order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and
then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.
After
Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and
influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They
found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported
words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to
quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met
in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be
no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff
Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation
into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment
of an independent special counsel.
Since 2021, Trump-skeptical
Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney
and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending
election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House
speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less
hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger
and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend
to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to
the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination
seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.
Most of the people who
would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed
the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy;
forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent
opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and
elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the
institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses.
Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would
share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement
against his perceived opponents—not only the Biden family, but Trump’s
own former attorney general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If
Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater
for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to
Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its
investments in the Trump family.
First-term Trump told aides that
he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides
who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to
adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term.
Liberals in Israel and India would find themselves isolated as the U.S.
turned toward reaction and authoritarianism at home; East Asian
democracies would have to adjust to Trump protectionism and trade wars;
Mexico’s antidemocratic Morena party would have scope to snuff out free
institutions provided that it suppressed migration flows to the United
States.
Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.
If
Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the
popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College
with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by
Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition.
Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three
elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin
basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal
impunity and political vengeance.
In this scenario, Trump
opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system
has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking
president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other.
The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.
The outvoted
would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a
republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the
outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike
Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the
objective.”
So long as minority rule seems an occasional or
accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the
minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to
subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may
cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an
American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv
streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake
Israel’s court system.
And what might follow that? In 2020,
Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to
crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election.
Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some
reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to
convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s
an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody
else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.
If a
president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the
military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer
be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of
political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish
to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of
power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him
achieve.
That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in
2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its
familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time:
the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational
standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living
standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any
of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the
possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic
structure of the United States.
A second Trump presidency,
however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It
would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before”
and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is
contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021,
can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of
power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the
transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not
expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated
too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can
attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.
As
we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of
Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the
president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared
and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three
years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s
co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves
that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and
enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke”
college students.
For democracy to continue, however, the
democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major
participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system
careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.
When Benjamin
Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you
can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be
misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters
would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal
characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge
since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many
heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be
dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.
ATLANTIC
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