The Authoritarianism Is The Point, Part II

Will I have to do this every month until November 2024? Quite possibly!

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

Long-time and short-time readers of Drezner’s World are aware that the hard-working staff here has been deeply concerned about what a second Trump term would look like. The first term was pretty bad, with equal parts of malevolence and incompetence.

The second term is shaping up to have a whole lot more malevolence, for two reasons:

1. Even with the impulse control and attention span of a toddler, a second-term Trump understands the bureaucratic machinery of the executive branch a lot better than he did in 2017; and

2. The guardrails that partially thwarted him in the first term — Congress, the civil and foreign service, his own staffers — were badly eroded during his first term. What is noteworthy is not that Trump wants to enhance presidential power — some of us were warning about that issue years ago — but the degree to which Republican elites and voters have wholeheartedly embraced these ideas as well. If he wins again, he will likely do so with GOP majorities in the House and Senate along with a conservative Supreme Court. A lot of the public threats coming from the Trump campaign seem designed to drive out folks Trump would want to purge from the bureaucracy anyway. In other words, the guardrails will be weak to nonexistent if he wins again.

That was the point of something I wrote in November about the raft of stories regarding Trump’s second-term plans:

Less than a month later, has there been any more reporting of this kind? Why yes, yes there has! Let’s review, shall we?

#1: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, “Behind the Curtain: Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power grab,” Axios, November 13, 2023:

Former President Trump's allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024, officials involved in the effort tell Axios.

Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents….

If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls "Agenda 47."

The people leading these efforts aren't figures like Rudy Giuliani. They're smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.

#2: Gary Fields, “Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US. A legacy law gives him few guardrails,” Associated Press, November 27, 2023:

Campaigning in Iowa this year, Donald Trump said he was prevented during his presidency from using the military to quell violence in primarily Democratic cities and states.

Calling New York City and Chicago “crime dens,” the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination told his audience, “The next time, I’m not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.”

Trump has not spelled out precisely how he might use the military during a second term, although he and his advisers have suggested they would have wide latitude to call up units. While deploying the military regularly within the country’s borders would be a departure from tradition, the former president already has signaled an aggressive agenda if he wins, from mass deportations to travel bans imposed on certain Muslim-majority countries.

A law first crafted in the nation’s infancy would give Trump as commander in chief almost unfettered power to do so, military and legal experts said in a series of interviews.

#3: Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage, “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025,” New York Times, December 4, 2023:

Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason….

There is reason to believe various obstacles and bulwarks that limited Mr. Trump in his first term would be absent in a second one.

Some of what Mr. Trump tried to do was thwarted by incompetence and dysfunction among his initial team. But over four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. After courts blocked his first, haphazardly crafted travel ban, for example, his team developed a version that the Supreme Court allowed to take effect….

Fear of violence by Trump supporters also enforces control. In recent books, both Mr. Romney and Ms. Cheney said that Republican colleagues, whom they did not name, told them they wanted to vote against Mr. Trump in the Jan. 6-related impeachment proceedings but did not do so out of fear for their and their families’ safety.

#4: Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage, “A New Trump Administration Will ‘Come After’ the Media, Says Kash Patel,” New York Times, December 5, 2023.

A confidant of Donald J. Trump who is likely to serve in a senior national security role in any new Trump administration threatened on Tuesday to target journalists for prosecution if the former president regains the White House.

The confidant, Kash Patel, who served as Mr. Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council and also as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, made the remarks on a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, during a discussion about a potential second Trump presidency beginning in 2025.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Mr. Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” He added: “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

#5: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, “Behind the Curtain — Exclusive: How Trump would build his loyalty-first Cabinet,” Axios, December 7, 2023:

Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios….

Trump and his prospective top officials don't mince words about their plans:

They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home.

They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal….

A source close to the Trump campaign told us [Attorney General] is the office where Trump is "most likely to make a shocking pick," with the defiant view: "You want to weaponize DOJ, mother----er?'" 

It should be noted that last month the Trump campaign released a statement that declared stories focused on staffing a second Trump term were “largely unfounded and an unnecessary distraction” from the campaign. The statement also said, however that the outside mobilization of loyalists “are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful.”

The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo provided some context behind the campaign statement: in essence, the Trump campaign is worried that outside think tanks like Heritage or the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) are siphoning donor dollars away from the Trump 2024 campaign. He quotes one Trump operative explaining, “The Heritage people look down on the AFPI people like they’re a joke. And the AFPI people look at the Heritage people like they’re phony MAGA. Admittedly, that’s a little ironic because a lot of Trump’s most hardcore supporters look at AFPI like they’re phony MAGA.”

In other words, to the extent that the Trump campaign denies any of these outside groups, it is not because they are devising plans that are too extreme; it is that those plans are not extreme enough. Furthermore, an awful lot of what was excerpted above are direct quotes from Donald Trump or his campaign subordinates.¹

One of the few commonalities Trump has with past presidents is a strong desire to fulfill his campaign promises. Will everything reported above come to fruition if Trump is elected in 2025? No, because no incoming president can do everything they promise. Will most of it come to fruition? Yes, yes it will. And no one can say they weren’t warned.

1. I’m not dwelling on Trump’s only-a-dictator-on-day-one comments to Sean Hannity because the other stuff is sufficiently damning. But note that the most generous interpretation of Trump’s comments has to conclude that he refused to endorse Hannity’s claim that Trump would under no circumstances ever abuse power as retribution against anybody.