Former President Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College, four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York. He ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.
But he won. When all the votes are counted, he may not have won the popular vote, but he will have won a decisive victory in the Electoral College nonetheless. Behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes, including national bans on abortion, a mass deportation that could wreck the economy and subject Americans of any immigration status to invasive state scrutiny and force, and an immense distribution of income upward. The Democrats’ reward for steering the economy out of the post-pandemic economic crisis will be watching their opponent claim credit for the prosperity that their work created—an economy unencumbered by inflation and the high interest rates once needed to tame it. If Trump seems popular now, he will likely be much more popular in a year.
Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does. He did that when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory in 2016, and he will do it now. But there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases.
Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.
[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]
The Trump administration’s record of union busting, repealing workplace regulations, and cutting the welfare state to enrich the already wealthy will have few obstacles. The coterie of extremists that surrounds Trump has a radical conception of what America should be that includes suppressing the speech and expression of their political opponents; a racial hierarchy entitled to legal protection and enforcement; a society in which women’s bodies are treated as state property and LGBTQ people have few rights that others need respect. They will have a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable this agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it.
The Biden administration sought to bring down the temperature of the Trump era by offering aid to families, revitalizing American manufacturing, and easing inflation without increasing unemployment. That politics brought them few rewards, and the Democrats are unlikely to pursue such an agenda again, if they ever return to power. Trump has expressed admiration for nationalist strongmen such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds power in a country that still has elections but where there is little chance of the opposition succeeding, because both the state and social levers of power are under the purview of one man. The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.
I believe that, as in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community, something conservatives claim they want from newcomers, should lead a nation where all are supposed to be created equal. They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies, to the point of treating them as mere reproductive vessels not worth saving until they are bleeding out in an emergency room.
Millions of Americans are already asking themselves these questions this morning. All of the potential answers are disquieting. Choosing Trump in 2016, prior to everything he did as president, was frightening enough. Choosing him in full knowledge of how he would govern is worse. But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy. Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.