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Opinion A Trump dictatorship

is increasingly inevitable. We
should stop pretending.
By Robert Kagan
Editor at large
November 30, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EST

(Anthony Gerace for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images,

AFP)

Robert Kagan, a Post Opinions contributing editor, is the

author of “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America
Apart — Again,” which will be published by Knopf in May.
L
et’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality:
There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States,
and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald
Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the
RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20),
Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the
rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is
unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or
ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other
Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence.
The fact that many Americans might prefer other candidates,
much ballyhooed by such political sages as Karl Rove, will soon
become irrelevant when millions of Republican voters turn out
to choose the person whom no one allegedly wants.

For many months now, we have been living in a world of self-

delusion, rich with imagined possibilities. Maybe it will be Ron
DeSantis, or maybe Nikki Haley. Maybe the myriad indictments
of Trump will doom him with Republican suburbanites. Such
hopeful speculation has allowed us to drift along passively,
conducting business as usual, taking no dramatic action to
change course, in the hope and expectation that something will
happen. Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is
a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to
shore before we go over the edge. But now the actions required
to get us to shore are looking harder and harder, if not
downright impossible.
The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle,
Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for
president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic
shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now,
Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to
express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively
about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s
behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful
have been free to spread their money around to help his
competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of
their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from
the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the
currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by
those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful
than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is
closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.
In fact, it has already begun. As his nomination becomes
inevitable, donors are starting to jump from other candidates to
Trump. The recent decision by the Koch political network to
endorse GOP hopeful Nikki Haley is scarcely sufficient to change
this trajectory. And why not? If Trump is going to be the
nominee, it makes sense to sign up early while he is still grateful
for defectors. Even anti-Trump donors must ask whether their
cause is best served by shunning the man who stands a
reasonable chance of being the next president. Will corporate
executives endanger the interests of their shareholders just
because they or their spouses hate Trump? It’s not surprising
that people with hard cash on the line are the first to flip.

The rest of the Republican Party will quickly follow. Rove’s

recent exhortation that primary voters choose anyone but
Trump is the last such plea you are likely to hear from anyone
with a future in the party. Even in a normal campaign, intraparty
dissent begins to disappear once the primaries produce a clear
winner. Most of the leading candidates have already pledged to
support Trump if he is the nominee, even before he has won a
single primary vote. Imagine their posture after he runs the table
on Super Tuesday. Most of the candidates running against him
will sprint toward him, competing for his favor. After Super
Tuesday, there will be no surer and shorter path to the
presidency for a Republican than to become the loyal running
mate of a man who will be 82 in 2028.
Republicans who have tried to navigate the Trump era by mixing
appeals to non-Trump voters with repeated professions of
loyalty to Trump will end that show. As perilous as it is for
Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be
impossible once he has sewn up the nomination. The party will
be in full general-election mode, subordinating all to the
presidential campaign. What Republican or conservative will be
standing up to Trump then? Will the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, which has been rather boldly opposing Trump,
continue to do so once he is the nominee and it is a binary choice
between Trump and Biden? There will be no more infighting,
only outfighting; in short, a tsunami of Trump support from all
directions. A winner is a winner. And a winner who stands a
reasonable chance of wielding all the power there is to wield in
the world is going to attract support no matter who they are.
That is the nature of power, at any time in any society.
But Trump will not only dominate his party. He will again
become the central focus of everyone’s attention. Even today, the
news media can scarcely resist following Trump’s every word
and action. Once he secures the nomination, he will loom over
the country like a colossus, his every word and gesture
chronicled endlessly. Even today, the mainstream news media,
including The Post and NBC News, is joining forces with
Trump’s lawyers to seek televised coverage of his federal
criminal trial in D.C. Trump intends to use the trial to boost his
candidacy and discredit the American justice system as corrupt
— and the media outlets, serving their own interests, will help
him do it.
T
rump will thus enter the general-election campaign early
next year with momentum, backed by growing political
and financial resources, and an increasingly unified
party. Can the same be said of Biden? Is Biden’s power likely to
grow over the coming months? Will his party unify around him?
Or will alarm and doubt among Democrats, already high,
continue to increase? Even at this point, the president is
struggling with double-digit defections among Black Americans
and younger voters. Jill Stein and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have
already launched, respectively, third-party and independent
campaigns, coming at Biden in the main from the populist left.
The decision by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) not to run for
reelection in West Virginia but instead to contemplate a third-
party run for the presidency is potentially devastating. The
Democratic coalition is likely to remain fractious as the
Republicans unify and Trump consolidates his hold.
Biden, as some have pointed out, does not enjoy the usual
advantages of incumbency. Trump is effectively also an
incumbent, after all. That means Biden is unable to make the
usual incumbent’s claim that electing his opponent is a leap into
the unknown. Few Republicans regard the Trump presidency as
having been either abnormal or unsuccessful. In his first term,
the respected “adults” around him not only blocked some of his
most dangerous impulses but also kept them hidden from the
public. To this day, some of these same officials rarely speak
publicly against him. Why should Republican voters have a
problem with Trump if those who served him don’t? Regardless
of what Trump’s enemies think, this is going to be a battle of two
tested and legitimate presidents.

Trump, meanwhile, enjoys the usual advantage of non-

incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must
carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck,
like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that
their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these
crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway
inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to
make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not
already believe it.
Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger,
moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the
speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are
structural advantages in the coming general election, in short,
they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the
problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less

than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with
the political system in general. Rarely in American history has
democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar
Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the
squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless
fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile
and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for
someone to cut through it all and get something — anything —
done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis,
either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s

dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot
races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the
one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one
candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented
power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing
number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump
is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of
the system. Advantage: Trump.
Which brings us to Trump’s expanding legal battlefronts. No
doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without
spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail.
Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is
going to display his unusual power within the American political
system.

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He

certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged
with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020
election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to
obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is
crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at
him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him
down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On

the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power.
That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from
his following, not from the institutions of American government,
and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses
lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it,
and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he
is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him,
defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains
on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.
And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges
throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of
court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power
balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will
shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to
demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone
like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check
should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to
overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for
crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump
wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of
government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his
army of followers.

I
mention all this only to answer one simple question: Can
Trump win the election? The answer, unless something
radical and unforeseen happens, is: Of course he can. If that
weren’t so, the Democratic Party would not be in a mounting
panic about its prospects.

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the

most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he
wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers
that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the
decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any
president, fewer even than in his own first term.
What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the
institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election,
will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that
could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to
control him better when he is president of the United States and
appointing his own attorney general and all the other top
officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man
who gets himself elected president despite indictments,
courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he
even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead
ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?

Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot

these days without congressional approval, as even Barack
Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue
president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already
proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office
and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

2024 presidential election

Catch up on the
winners and
losers and
takeaways from
the third
Republican
primary debate.
Compare where
the 2024
 presidential candidates stand on key issues like abortion,
climate and the economy.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal

bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials
who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government
under every president. They are generally in the business of
limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it,
“Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will
happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly
because he had no government team of his own to fill the
administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in
his second administration will not be taking office with the
unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the
Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to
believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone,
replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to
Trump.

What about the desire for reelection, a factor that constrains

most presidents? Trump might not want or need a third term,
but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes
indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more
effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court,
if he refused to be blocked? Why should anyone think that
amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the
Constitution for a man like Trump, or perhaps more
importantly, for his devoted supporters?
A final constraint on presidents has been their own desire for a
glittering legacy, with success traditionally measured in terms
that roughly equate to the well-being of the country. But is that
the way Trump thinks? Yes, Trump might seek a great legacy,
but it is strictly his own glory that he craves. As with Napoleon,
who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions
for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s
ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again,
clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he
doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his
failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his
standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked
anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they
hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be
Trump’s primary mission as president.

H
aving answered the question of whether Trump can
win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will
his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are,
again, pretty good.
It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his
mood following an election victory. He will have spent the
previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by
myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best:
exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside
him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to
contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you
want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he
could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for
vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live
like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and
cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether
legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American
Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the
American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes,
and as president, he will return the favor.
What will that look like? Trump has already named some of
those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials
from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark
A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others
who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the
FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe;
Justice Department officials who refused his demands to
overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee;
Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.);
and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his
impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only
person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with
people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of
“vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially
authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who
cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be
subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump
administration will be filled with people who will not need
explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local
gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people
“work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his
desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him
happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the
process.
Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with.
Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly
targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a
particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s
“China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers
were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of
influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred.
Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA
Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his
election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration
is a “communist regime.”
It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has a “pro-Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful chairman of
the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris
Rodgers (R-Wash.), put it this year, and is deliberately “ceding
American leadership and security to China.” Republicans these
days routinely charge that their opponents are not just naive or
inadequately attentive to China’s rising power but are actual
“sympathizers” with Beijing. “Communist China has their
President … China Joe,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)
tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
has called the president “Beijing Biden.” The Republican Senate
nominee in New Hampshire last year even called Republican
Gov. Chris Sununu a “Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.”
We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep
state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.),
there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American
security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on
the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true
Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of
America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be
criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to
persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws
now on the books that give the federal government enormous
power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a
dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual
opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or
violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both
parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their
tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with
the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-
tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United
States should ease pressure on China? Or the government
official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It
didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.

And who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions

of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? A Republican
Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its
powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes,
just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless?
And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend
even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.
Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the
accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it
is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his
audience and those that do not. But in a regime where the ruler
has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the
press will find itself under significant and constant pressure.
Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled
president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.

Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public

arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the
courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the
courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many
will risk their own careers to defend others? In a nation
congenitally suspicious of government, who will stick up for the
rights of former officials who become targets of Trump’s Justice
Department? There will be ample precedents for those seeking
to justify the persecution. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas
corpus, the Wilson administration shut down newspapers and
magazines critical of the war; Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up
Japanese Americans and placed them in camps. We will pay the
price for every transgression ever committed against the laws
designed to protect individual rights and freedoms.
H
ow will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime
of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage?
Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to
oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in
the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when
some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds
himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will
know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI
and several congressional committees are looking into it. And
who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax
cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might
be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize
these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting
down opposition to Trump across the country?

The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where

almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped
by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face
all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for
them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and
many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend
entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’
rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most
Americans can go about their daily business, they might not
care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.
Yes, there will be a large opposition movement centered in the
Democratic Party, but exactly how this opposition will stop the
persecution is hard to see. Congress and the courts will offer
little relief. Democratic politicians, particularly members of the
youngest generation, will yell and scream, but if they are not
joined by Republicans, it will look like the same old
partisanship. If Democrats still control one house of Congress,
they will be able to blunt some investigations, but the odds that
they will control both houses after 2024 are longer than the odds
of a Biden victory. Nor is there sufficient reason to hope that the
disordered and dysfunctional opposition to Trump today will
suddenly become more unified and effective once Trump takes
power. That is not how things work. In evolving dictatorships,
the opposition is always weak and divided. That’s what makes
dictatorship possible in the first place. Opposition movements
rarely get stronger and more unified under the pressures of
persecution. Today there is no leader for Democrats to rally
behind. It is difficult to imagine that such a leader will emerge
once Trump regains power.

But even if the opposition were to become strong and unified, it

is not obvious what it would do to protect those facing
persecution. The opposition’s ability to wield legitimate,
peaceful and legal forms of power will already have been found
wanting in this election cycle, when Democrats and anti-Trump
Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and
still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal
action? What would that look like?
Americans might take to the streets. In fact, it is likely that many
people will engage in protests against the new regime, perhaps
even before it has had a chance to prove itself deserving of them.
But then what? Even in his first term, Trump and his advisers on
more than one occasion discussed invoking the Insurrection Act.
No less a defender of American democracy than George H.W.
Bush invoked the act to deal with the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
It is hard to imagine Trump not invoking it should “the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs” take to
the streets. One suspects he will relish the opportunity.

And who will stop him? His own handpicked military advisers?
That seems unlikely. He could make retired Lt. Gen. Michael
Flynn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if he wanted, and it is
unlikely a Republican Senate would decline to confirm. Does
anyone think military leaders will disobey commands from their
duly elected, constitutionally authorized, commander in chief?
Do we even want the military to have to make that call? There is
every reason to believe that active-duty troops and reservists are
likely to be disproportionately more sympathetic to a newly
reelected President Trump than to the “Radical Left Thugs”
supposedly causing mayhem in the streets of their towns and
cities. Those who hope to be saved by a U.S. military devoted to
the protection of the Constitution are living in a fantasyland.
Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly
Democratic states such as California and New York through a
form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and
statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a
tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our
federal system. (Should Biden win, some Republican states
might engage in nullification.) But not even the bluest states are
monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find
themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become
bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and
conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their
hero’s triumph. The power shift at the federal level, and the tone
of menace and revenge emanating from the White House, will
likely embolden all kinds of counter-resistance even in deep-
blue states, including violent protests. What resources will the
governors have to combat such attacks and maintain order? The
state and local police? Will those entities be willing to use force
against protesters who will likely enjoy the public support of the
president? The Democratic governors might not be eager to find
out.
Should Trump be successful in launching a campaign of
persecution and the opposition prove powerless to stop it, then
the nation will have begun an irreversible descent into
dictatorship. With each passing day, it will become harder and
more dangerous to stop it by any means, legal or illegal. Try to
imagine what it will be like running for office on an opposition
ticket in such an environment. In theory, the midterm elections
in 2026 might hold hope for a Democratic comeback, but won’t
Trump use his considerable powers, both legal and illegal, to
prevent that? Trump insists and no doubt believes that the
current administration corruptly used the justice system to try to
prevent his reelection. Will he not consider himself justified in
doing the same once he has all the power? He has, of course,
already promised to do exactly that: to use the powers of his
office to persecute anyone who dares challenge him.

T
his is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into
dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is
inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories.
Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is
arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of
this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything,
Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and
we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any
of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by
this if you choose.
What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States
falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so
many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are
left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a
man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in
2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American
president would try to remain in office after losing an election,
that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe
that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and
stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless
reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party
and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that
obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from
being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short
steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of
dictatorship.

Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we

thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing
into North America a year from now, would we be content to
hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable
measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not
work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried
anyway?
Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading
toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a
problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of
reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to
prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and
we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the
assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he
could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump
from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The
voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t.
Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either
of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for
president much more difficult, but they didn’t.
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology
has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have
required extraordinary action by certain people, whether
politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with
their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It
would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running
against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the
presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved
normally, spending their time and money attacking each other,
assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or
that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a
clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a
few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have
been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other
Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own
party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was
finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus
avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump
supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on
pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the
confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or
something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they
be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a
high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope
for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work
yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the
latter.
A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work.
At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and
higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White
House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even
the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s
political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and
many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As
Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography,
Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for
Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical
safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear
should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power
and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of
property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked
at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion
suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin
of oneself and one’s family?

We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we
continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some
intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our
collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and,
above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal
democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang
but a whimper.