No. of Recommendations: 3
An authoritarian is someone who amasses power to amass more power, often exploiting gray areas in the law to do it — or ignoring the rule of law outright. In some senses of the definition, Trump fits the mold, says Meredith McGehee, a government ethics expert who formerly headed the bipartisan political reform group Issue One. For example: Trump ignored dozens of court rulings saying he had lost the 2020 election as he tried to stay in power anyway.
Now Trump and his allies are aspiring to break even more norms to get what they want. Trump said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One.”
“Since he has been president, his public statements indicate he has great frustration with using the system as it currently is,” McGehee said, “and when he makes a comment, ‘Yeah, I’d like to be dictator for a day,’ that indicates he does not value the democratic process as it has been traditionally viewed by the American political system.”
Here are some of the authoritarian-like actions Trump or his allies say he’ll take in his second term:
Rounding up illegal immigrants and keeping them in mass deportation camps
Use the federal government to target his enemies
Make it harder to protest against him
Legal and political experts worry this could do a lot of damage to democracy as we know it: “This is an existential moment for the country,” Michael Steele, a former head of the Republican National Committee, said in an interview this fall. “Do you really want to live in a country where the president of the United States is going after his political enemies?”
Amber Phillips
