One of the pleasures of last week’s presidential debate was watching Vice President Kamala Harris deftly criticize former President Trump for his affinity for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
“It is absolutely common knowledge that these dictators and autocrats are dying to have you as president again because they are very clear that they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris said. If Trump were given a second term, she said, he would easily hand over Ukraine to Putin “for the sake of favors and what you think is a friendship with … a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
In a confusing response, Trump repeated his dubious claim that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine under his command and added that Putin has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. “And eventually,” Trump said, “he might use them.”
He spoke approvingly of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader and a media darling of the MAGA movement. I wish I could give you an exact quote, but I couldn’t extract a full, meaningful sentence from Trump’s comments about Orban.
Trump has always flirted with the idea of autocracy, but now that flirtation has turned into full-blown embrace. He has threatened to use the Justice Department as a weapon against his political opponents, dismantle the civil service system to replace professional federal employees with loyalists, invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress protests, reinstate his ban on Muslim immigration and imprison millions of immigrants in detention camps.
If you don't believe he's serious, you're in denial.
Trump has already tried to pressure state officials to overturn the results of a free and fair election. When that didn't work, his supporters staged a deadly assault on the Capitol aimed at stopping the certification of his loss to Joe Biden. Even before all that, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright called Trump “the first anti-democratic president in modern American history.”
And, like most despots or would-be despots, he is sadistic, belittling those who have given their lives for their country, mocking disabled people, and separating children from their families.
To say that democracy experts are worried would be an understatement.
“I consider Trump to be a very serious threat to American democracy,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of numerous books on democracy. “He has repeatedly demonstrated in word and deed that he does not value democracy, does not respect constitutional norms, does not accept the results of democratic elections if he loses, and only values the friendship of authoritarian autocrats like Orban and Putin over our democratic allies.”
I first met Diamond in July 2019, when Trump was two and a half years into his presidency. He had just published “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency,” a disturbing look at the retreat of democracy and the rise of authoritarians around the world. An entire chapter, titled “The Decline of American Democracy,” is devoted to Trump.
“We can survive the sleaze and vulgarity of a president,” Diamond wrote. “We can challenge and reverse bad policies. But the threat Trump poses to America’s democratic institutions and norms is unprecedented.”
And, as Diamond told me via email from Taiwan on Thursday, the threat has only grown more serious, especially since the Supreme Court undermined the fundamental American ideal that no one is above the law.
“He is far more unhinged now than when he ran in 2016 or 2020, and I truly fear for his potential to abuse presidential power and use it as a weapon against his opponents,” Diamond wrote, “even more so in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision expanding immunity from prosecution for virtually anything a president does in office that could be considered an official act.”
One of the most worrying aspects of Trump's popularity is the willingness of his supporters to accept a president with unchecked authority.
A February survey by the Pew Research Center on global views on authoritarianism found that about a third of Americans said they would support a system “in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference” from lawmakers or the courts. (Not surprisingly, that figure roughly matches the share of Americans who actually want a second Trump term.)
Diamond has often said that democracies, with their strong protections of civil liberties and the rule of law, do not die of a heart attack but die slowly, gradually, poisoned at the root by the fear and anger instilled by demagogues like Trump.
“They say we lost,” Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week, complaining about 2020 as usual. “But we didn’t lose. And we’re never going to let that happen again in this country.”
Pay attention: He is telling you exactly what He plans to do.
