The Danger in a Second Trump Presidency
At a recent rally and then again on Fox News, and then again on the Joe Rogan podcast, Donald Trump has been talking about using the military and the National Guard to control chaos on election day approaching on November 5th. Asked if he was worried about violence by immigrants, he answered: "I think the bigger problem is the enemy within," continuing to say that "radical left-lunatics" could pose a potential problem on Election Day. "It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military." In some appearances, the former President has named Representative Adam Schiff and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as “enemies within.” This has raised the prospect that he might unleash the military at his critics and opponents. It should be noted that the former President does not, of course, control either the military or the National Guards. Even if he were elected, he would not control them until he takes office in January, 2025.
Most current Republican officials have insisted that Trump doesn’t mean what he is saying. This opinion may seem like putting one’s head in the ground. If there was one lesson we learned from the rise of Hitlerism in Germany in the 1930s is that we must listen to would-be dictators and totalitarians when they tell us what they plan to do.
But if you’ve been listening to Trump for the last decade, it is a real question of whether he means what he says. Trump—very much unlike someone like Hitler—generally does not mean what he says. When Trump says he will make Mexico pay for a wall, or when he says that the crowds at his inauguration are the biggest, or when he says that he won the 2020 election, it is rarely the case that he actually means what he says. Or at least, Trump continually keeps us guessing about whether and how to credit his statements. If most of us use language to communicate ideas, Trump deploys language to confuse, destroy, and obliterate any sense of meaning or common understanding. His approach to language is like his approach to politics, to undo and undermine settled consensus, to sow chaos, and hope from that chaos to snatch victory from the ruins.
The problem with evaluating someone like the former President is that it is incredibly difficult to know when he might mean what he says. Do we credit his words and fear them? Or do we smile knowingly at the way he is trolling us, pushing us to react and to overreact so that he makes us look like shrill worriers, once again proving that the liberal elite are wimpy, censorious, and crazed. Trump’s tactical brilliance is to mobilize moral panic. And yet, how can one not respond to such obviously fascist threats?
John Kelly, the former Marine General and former Chief of Staff for President Trump is alarmed enough at Trump’s insinuations that he might mobilize the army to go after the enemies within that he has given an interview to the New York Times in which he “stressed that voters, in his view, should consider fitness and character when selecting a president, even more than a candidate’s stances on the issues.” Kelly confirmed that Trump had made admiring comments about Adolf Hitler and worried that he “would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.” He also said that based on his understanding of the definition of a fascist—”It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy”—that based on Kelly’s experience, “Trump met the definition of a “fascist.”” In the aftermath of Kelly’s interview, another 13 former Trump administration officials released a letter that says: “For the good of our country, our democracy, and our Constitution, we are asking you to listen closely and carefully to General Kelly’s warning.”
None of this seems to matter to so many Trump voters who seemingly should be opposed to electing a fascist because these voters simply don’t believe the former President means what he says. Consider Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. When CNN’s Jake Tapper read Trump’s remarks to Youngkin, Youngkin simply denied that Trump meant what he said. Here is how Tom Nichols described the interview:
Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: “Is that something that you support?” Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens. Tapper added that Trump had singled out Schiff. Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “Obviously there is a border crisis,” Tapper said. “Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?
Well, Youngkin shrugged, he “can’t speak” for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was “misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.”
Some of the people who watched Youngkin’s appalling dishonesty immediately thought of one of the most famous passages from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
But this interpretation gives Youngkin too much credit. Orwell’s dictators were able to terrify people with torture and deprivation into accepting the government’s lies. Youngkin, however, is not a terrified subject of an authoritarian regime: He’s just an opportunist. Like J. D. Vance, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Youngkin is demanding that everyone else play along and pretend that Trump is just a misunderstood immigration hawk, and then move on—all so that Youngkin can later say that he was a loyal Republican when he contends for the leadership of the GOP after Trump is either defeated, retired, or long gone.
Nichols is right that Youngkin is not being terrorized into denying reality. And Youngkin may be an opportunist. But there is one way in which Youngkin is right in a way that Nichols will not understand. Youngkin knows—or at least thinks he knows—that Trump doesn’t mean what he says.
If Youngkin is right—and I think he may be—then the danger Trump poses is less fascism or the end of democracy, and is, instead, the unraveling of the American faith in a liberal and elite-guaranteed common sense that has governed the country since the end of WWII.
In a recent essay titled, “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” Adam Gopnik struggles with the question of whether Trump ever should be taken to mean what he says. The very fact that after four years of a Trump presidency and 10 years of an ever-present Trumpian media barrage we still don’t know what Trump really thinks or what he will is evidence enough of his utter lack of character. And that lack of character is the essence of who Trump is. Gopnik marvels that
Those words that Trump sticks into his call for insurrection—”peacefully and patriotically”—show him to be as much a troll as a rebel. Trolls can be as dangerous as rebels. But it is important that we understand the danger of a second Trump presidency The real question to ask about the danger Trump poses to the country is what it means to re-elect as President someone who now has so fundamentally proven to the world that he simply has no character.
I tried to answer this question in two short essays I wrote for the website, Divided We Fall. The editors of the website asked me to participate in a debate around the question of whether a second Trump presidency was a threat to democracy. My two contributions to that debate argue that Trump is a threat to a liberal order and to fundamental American freedoms, but that he is not a threat to democracy. On the contrary, his brand of demagogic democratic politics is actually part of a long tradition of American democracy. Over and again the editors at “Divided We Fall” misread and misinterpreted my essay. So much so that in the published version they titled my first contribution “Another Trump Presidency Would Endanger the Future of American Democracy.” But this is not what I wrote.
In my essay, I write:“The danger Trump poses is less to American democracy than to the fabric of the nation, the common world that holds a diverse country together.” I argue that Trump leads a “resurgent Jacksonian democratic movement with contempt for the establishment. He believes that “winning” and destroying American liberalism justifies risks tearing the country apart, from attempting to overturn an election to his shameless lies.” As I seek to answer the question posed, I argue that “Trump represents a strain of American democracy that is responding to the victory of liberal democrats who have controlled American politics since the end of World War II.” And I continue:
The threat Trump poses is that in his power-hungry zeal to destroy liberal America, he will run roughshod over the American tradition of limited government. Limited government depends on dispersed institutional power to restrain the human urge to accumulate centralized power. Not only Congress and the courts, but also state governments, universities, businesses, unions, the independent legal system, and the free press are institutions that wield power and can oppose the power concentrated in a president. Trump’s challenge to this American dispersion of power is his corrosive cynicism, lies, and rule-breaking which normalize criminality and undermine faith in institutional norms.
Understood as a Jacksonian, Trump presages a shift in power away from elite cosmopolitans and toward parochial, nativist, and prejudiced interests. That kind of power shift is unsettling for those who have become convinced that expert-driven cosmopolitan universalism is morally and practically superior to common-sense, grounded community folkways. Such a transformation in the power structure will change American society, but it is not antithetical to American democracy.
The danger Trump poses is less to American democracy than to the fabric of the nation, the common world that holds a diverse country together. What is dangerous is not his Jacksonian populism but his boorish resentments, his affinity for conspiracy theories, his anger and hatred, and his willingness to insult and demean. Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, his impotent obsession with the size of his rallies, his claims that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats, and his wild lies about opponents from Kamala Harris to Liz Cheney threaten to split the country and unmoor it from our American idealism and pragmatism.
The problem with consistent lying by a president is not that the lies he tells will be believed; many, if not most, of his supporters know Trump is lying and go along with it because they think it is in their interests to do so. The real danger is that Trump’s constant lying gives rise to cynicism. When nothing is believed and everything is seen simply as a position of power, the consequence is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
There is little doubt that Trump’s assault on reality and on the distinction between fact and fiction is central to one aspect of what Hannah Arendt calls totalitarianism. What is not clear, however, that simply undoing reality is a precursor for either totalitarianism or fascism. It could be that Trump’s assault on reality is simply a nihilistic way to undo a system he resents. While the destructive intent in Trump’s attacks are clear, it is fully unclear if he has any vision of what to replace the system with that he hopes to destroy. The danger Trump poses is less to democracy or of fascism; it is, rather, the unleashing of chaos where power divorced from the limits of character will overwhelm all ideals.