“Former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024.”
That is the chilling, but entirely accurate, way Heather Cox Richardson describes the bottom line of a Monday New York Times story on the proposals of the Trump campaign.
Trump’s goal. the Times story reports, is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” Trump is reported to be happy that the Times story came out. He is not denying that it accurately reflects his plans.
Trump is pledging to pardon the people who, at his urging, joined in an insurrection with the object of overturning the people’s will in an election, ending American democracy, and making him dictator.
In his address accepting the Republican presidential nomination seven years ago this coming Friday, on July 21, 2016, Trump proclaimed: “I alone can fix it.” He has now dropped all pretense and is making clear that what he would do if he were to return to the White House is destroy it, the system of limited government with checks and balances that was established in the Constitution.
On Sunday evening, Trump received a letter informing him that he is a target of Jack Smith’s investigation into the attempt to steal the 2020 Election for Trump and the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Five years ago yesterday, the front page of the New York Daily News referred to Trump’s siding with Vladimir Putin over American intelligence agencies with an image and headline that apply now to both current stories: Trump’s attempt to steal the last election and his plans to make himself dictator:
Trump is not running to be president of the American Constitutional Republic; he seeks to be the dictator of an authoritarian regime that would end the American Experiment in rule by the people.
Make no mistake: We are facing the greatest danger that our Republic has faced since the Enslavers’ Rebellion.
We are at an inflection point of monumental significance. As Lincoln said in his annual message to Congress in December 1862, a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation:
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
“[I] do not call myself much of a subject at all.”
The response by Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye in the 1992 film of The Last of the Mohicans to a British officer asking him whether he considers himself a loyal subject of the king is the classic statement of the American outlook:
LIEUTENANT
You, sir! You call yourself a loyal subject?
HAWKEYE
...No...Do not call myself much of a subject at all.
If Trump were again to become president, Americans would cease to be citizens; we would all become subjects.
It is beyond imagination that a majority of Americans would vote for that, but they might not have to for Trump to take office again.
The NSDAP (Nazi) Party in Germany never came close to winning a majority in a free election. In the last free election in November 1932, the Nazis dropped their representation in the Reichstag by 34 seats and won only 31.1 percent of the total vote. Yet, a few months later, Adolf Hitler had become dictator.
Well, you say, that’s because they had a multiparty system. Thank goodness we have a two-party system!
But, knowing that they could never win a two-way national election in which there was not significant voter suppression, wealthy interests on the extreme right are pushing a group called “No Labels” to field a third-party ticket that could take enough votes away from President Biden to allow Trump to get power.
And they are getting a serious look from people who should know better. I’ll have more to say about that in another essay sometime soon.
The issue before Americans over the next year and a half is now crystal clear:
In 2025, either Donald Trump or the American nation will go to prison.