A Dictator on Day 100

It was kind of obvious when he chose supervillain lighting for his official portrait.

I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist to commemorate the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term in office. The material will be familiar to you from my series on America’s “regime change.” But I have condensed it into a single, shorter article, and framed it in a way that provides context.

More than a year before he took office, Donald Trump vowed, not once, but twice, that if he were to be elected to a second term as president, he would be a dictator “on day one.” He insisted he would be a dictator only on day one—but what dictator has ever seized power only for one day and then immediately relinquished it? As Trump concludes his first 100 days in office [Tuesday], the record makes clear what he really intended: Centralize all power in his person, overturning the checks and balances of the American system of government and replacing them with a dictatorship.

What he has sought to install is, in fact, a “dictatorship”—not in some emotional or hyperbolic sense of the term, not as a category merely suggesting the potential for future assaults on our freedom. He is establishing a dictatorship in an exact and literal sense. The president has in fact asserted the ability to exercise power on his personal whim, unchecked by any other branch or organ of government.

You may notice I’m trying to tread a fine line here, because I want people to be very alarmed—but not demoralized. So I put this in the present imperfect tense: Trump’s dictatorship is something that is happening. It’s not something that will happen or might happen. It is a present reality, not a mere future possibility. But it is something that is still going on and not completed. “The dictatorship has been asserted, but not yet consolidated and entrenched.”

I sketch out four main prongs of Trump’s first 100 days in office.

1. He has stolen the power of the purse from Congress.

2. He has begun to seize and imprison people without due process.

3. He has defied orders from the courts, including the Supreme Court.

4. He controls the economy by way of personal, arbitrary authority over tariffs.

As for defying the courts, the main takeaway from an otherwise shambolic interview with Trump that was aired yesterday is that he openly admitted that he could comply with the Supreme Court’s demand that he return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but he refuses to do so.

“You could get him back,” Moran said to the president. “There’s a phone on this desk.”

“I could,” Trump replied.

Well, there you have it—exactly what the Supreme Court needs to declare him in contempt of the entire federal judicial system. They may not take that step, but as I observe here, “A retreat on the part of the judiciary, at this point, would not end Trump’s lawlessness—it would merely acquiesce to it.”

In summing it all up, I took an idea that has been bouncing around on the Internet and put it in my own words.

In the Declaration of Independence, after the opening passage in which the American Founders declare the individual rights which government must recognize and serve, they provided a list of the British king’s violations of that trust. The central items in that list are these four:

• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

Donald Trump has treated this as a to-do list. He has imposed tariffs on us at his whim and cut off our trade, while he denies us the benefits of due process and jury trials and is already transporting his victims overseas for imprisonment. These are, as the Declaration observes, “every act which may define a tyrant.”

Read the whole thing.

Dictator on Day 100

Present Imperfect

But like I said, this is a “present imperfect” tyranny, and its hold is still partial and tenuous.

One sign of hope is that the American people seem to be suffering the biggest case of buyer’s remorse in history. Donald Trump’s poll numbers are crashing down as the fantasy pop-culture image people constructed of him is once again contradicted by the reality.