With this presidential election seemingly a jump ball, what might American democracy and the world look like if Donald Trump is again elected president?
I think it’s hyperbole to suggest, as Hillary Clinton did, that a Trump election would be “the end of our country as we know it.” I don’t think that Trump could turn the United States into a dictatorship.
That said, in the course of four decades of covering the world, I’ve repeatedly seen charismatic leaders win democratic elections and then undermine those democracies. The populist left did that in Venezuela, Mexico and El Salvador, and the populist right did it in Hungary, India and Poland (Poland managed to claw its way back). In his lust for power, willingness to ignore democratic norms and eagerness to glorify himself and suppress opposition, Trump reminds me of those leaders.
“He is the most dangerous person to this country,” Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bob Woodward.
It’s not that Trump would declare himself dictator for life, but he has already adopted the standard strongman approach of trying to weaponize the legal system to punish and intimidate critics. When he was president, he proposed prosecuting Clinton and did force a criminal investigation into former Secretary of State John Kerry.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump said in June.
It’s worth noting that his efforts to prosecute Clinton and Kerry didn’t succeed, and American democracy survived his first term largely unscathed. Democratic institutions are stronger in the United States than in Hungary or Venezuela, and our system is less vulnerable.
It’s also true that in his first term, Trump’s autocratic inclinations were frustrated by incompetence and by frantic efforts by his own aides to impede him. What would be different in a second term is that he is better prepared and seems ready to bring in like-minded aides who would empower his antidemocratic efforts.
I’ve seen in many other countries how threats and revenge can intimidate the business community and civil society into grudging acquiescence. When Trump was in office, his administration reportedly took steps to hurt Jeff Bezos and his corporate interests, possibly costing him a $10 billion military contract for cloud computing. That may explain Bezos’ decision to withhold an endorsement in the presidential election by The Washington Post, which he owns.
When I was The Times’s bureau chief in Beijing many years ago and wrote tough articles about China’s prime minister, the Chinese government responded by aggressively auditing my taxes. So it felt familiar to learn that Trump told aides to use the I.R.S. to audit the taxes of his critics or those who wouldn’t do his bidding, like James Comey and Andrew McCabe of the F.B.I.
Aides initially resisted, but Comey and McCabe were later selected — supposedly randomly — for audits. Trump said he knew nothing about this, but his denials also felt straight out of the Chinese playbook. Officials in China would tell reporters things that we all knew were false not to persuade anyone but to confuse the issue or to establish the party line for followers to echo.
The first time I met Trump as a politician, he made absurd claims and then denied ever making them — and I felt I was transported back into meetings with Chinese officials whose relationship with truth and reality was not just casual but largely coincidental.
The First Amendment is long established in the United States, and it will survive. But Trump can undermine the free press by bullying corporate owners. After all, about a year ago, he called for NBC’s corporate owners to be investigated for treason because of the network’s coverage, and he suggested recently that ABC News should be punished for the way it managed the presidential debate.
“They’re a news organization,” he said of ABC News. “They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license.” Later he called for CBS to lose its license as well and said that “60 Minutes” “should be taken off the air, frankly.” National news organizations don’t actually need licenses, but their local affiliate TV stations do.
Trump has repeatedly called for changing libel laws to reduce protections for news organizations. Two years ago he called for imprisoning journalists who don’t reveal sources in national security cases and added gleefully that the prospect of prison rape would make journalists ready to give up sources. (I believe journalists are made of sterner stuff, and I’ve seen that in the raw courage of reporters risking their lives in autocracies like Russia.)
Just as alarming is Trump’s suggestion that he would use the armed forces against U.S. citizens. In October he suggested that the National Guard or military be deployed in America against “the enemy from within,” including “radical left lunatics.”
That kind of language may encourage more political violence of the type we already saw on Jan. 6. Trump seemed to acknowledge the risk in his April Time magazine interview, when he was asked about the possibility of post-election violence. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he said ominously. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
Spare a moment as well to contemplate what a Trump election might mean internationally.
If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Russian forces might now be in Kyiv, for Trump could never have mustered the international coalition and rounded up the assistance to keep Russia at bay (even if he had wanted to). Ukraine would probably have collapsed, Russia might have moved on to Moldova or Latvia, and NATO might well be an empty shell. Observing the fecklessness of the West, China would probably be more aggressive toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, so war might be more likely in Asia.
Trump presents himself as a strongman, but my sense from conversations with foreign officials and business leaders is that what he actually projects is weakness. He would damage the Atlantic alliance and threaten the network of countries that Joe Biden has knit together to restrain China, and he seems to discount the challenges from Moscow and Beijing.
Just last month, Trump described some of his American critics as “scum” and “a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Perhaps that’s why Russia is interfering in the U.S. election with the apparent aim of helping Trump.
Similarly, some Chinese people joke that Trump’s Chinese name is Chuan Jianguo, or Build-the-Country Trump — meaning that for all Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, his chaotic approach and disregard for allies make China stronger.
Trump has little interest in foreign wars, but he can be reckless and inclined to escalate; the upshot is that early in his presidency we came “much closer than anyone would know” to war with North Korea, in Trump’s own words to Woodward. His defense secretary, James Mattis, was so worried that he slept in gym clothes for a time and installed a flashing light in his bathroom to alert him to a crisis if he happened to be showering.
None of us knows how events will unfold, and Trump would not achieve all his aims. Two years ago, he urged the “termination” of the Constitution, and that won’t happen. When he was in office and a federal circuit court blocked one of his programs, he told an aide to “cancel” the court — it didn’t work then, and it won’t next year.
But could Trump make the United States less democratic and make the world far more dangerous? Absolutely. We would be gambling with our future.
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