In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Most Western countries are horrified by this crackdown which has killed hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed.
“When the students invaded Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost failed,” Donald Trump said in an interview with the magazine Playboy the year following the massacre. “He was vicious, he was horrible, but he repressed [la manifestation] with force. This shows the power of force. Our country is currently perceived as weak. »
It was a commonplace phrase in a high-profile interview, delivered to a reporter profiling a famous 43-year-old businessman who was then not involved in national politics or business global. But in light of what Trump subsequently became, his exaltation of the merciless crushing of Democratic protesters seems almost like an omen.
Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric since the start of the 2024 campaign has sparked growing concern and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen.
In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his opponents as “vermin” who must be “exterminated,” said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged shooting shoplifters and suggested that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley deserved to be executed for treason.
As he runs for president again while facing four criminal charges, Donald Trump may seem angrier, more desperate, and more dangerous to a democracy like America’s than during his first term . But the common thread that emerges goes back much further: for decades, he has glorified political violence and spoken with admiration of autocrats.
What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much its character as its environment. The forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies during his first term—staffers who sometimes saw their job as reining him in, a few congressional Republicans sometimes willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance in the Supreme Court, which has sometimes ruled against him – would all be weaker.
Therefore, the more extreme policies and ideas of Trump and his advisers for a second term would be more likely to become reality.
A radical program
Some of the plans of Donald Trump and his allies are certainly consistent with what a typical Republican president would be likely to do. For example, Trump would most likely roll back many of President Joe Biden’s policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions and accelerating the transition to electric cars.
Other parts of Trump’s agenda, however, are aberrant. No American president before him had considered withdrawing from NATO. He said he would fundamentally reassess “NATO’s purpose and mission” during a second term.
He said he would order the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, which would be a violation of international law, unless the Mexican government agreed. It is very likely that this is not the case.
Trump would also use the military inside the United States. Although it is generally illegal to use troops to enforce the law within the country’s territory, the Insurrection Act provides for exceptions.
Trump’s plans to purge the country of immigrants living there illegally include large-scale raids, massive detention camps, deportation of millions of people a year, end of asylum, attempt to end citizenship of birth for children born on U.S. soil to parents living in the country illegally and the invocation of the Insurrection Act near the southern border to use troops as immigration agents.
Trump would seek to expand presidential power in multiple ways – by concentrating greater executive authority in the White House, ending the independence of agencies created by Congress to operate outside presidential control, and reducing civil service protections to make it easier to fire and replace tens of thousands of government employees.
More than anything else, Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a blatant challenge to democratic values. Modeling himself on the way he tried to get prosecutors to pursue his enemies when he was in office, he would end the post-Watergate norm of independence of investigations from House political control- White.
Asked about this, a spokesperson for Mr. Trump did not address the details, but instead criticized the New York Times while calling Mr. Trump “strong on crime.”
Weakened safeguards
Since his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has flouted democratic standards.
He falsely portrayed his defeat in the Iowa caucuses as fraud and implied that he would only consider the general election results legitimate if he won. He threatened to jail Hillary Rodham Clinton, called Mexican immigrants rapists and promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He offered to pay the legal costs of any supporters who beat protesters at his rallies and stoked hatred against journalists who covered his events.
During his time in office, Mr. Trump refused to divest from his businesses, and his courters booked expensive blocks of rooms in his hotels. Despite a law against nepotism, he gave White House jobs to his daughter and son-in-law. He used emergency power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
But some of his most potentially serious violations of norms have not come to fruition.
Trump has pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries. The Justice Department has opened several criminal investigations, from examining former Secretary of State John Kerry and former FBI Director James Comey to special counsel John Durham’s attempt to find a basis for indicting Obama-era national security officials or Mr.me Clinton of crimes linked to the origins of the Russia investigation. Much to Mr. Trump’s fury, prosecutors decided not to bring such charges.
And none of the attempts for which he was indicted were successful. Trump tried to force Ukraine to open a criminal investigation into Biden by withholding military aid, but Ukraine did not cooperate. Mr. Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat and stoked the Capitol riot, but Vice President Mike Pence and the majority of Congress rejected his bid to stay in power.
There is reason to believe that various obstacles and bulwarks that limited Trump in his first term would be absent in a second.
The incompetence and dysfunction of his initial team caused some of Mr. Trump’s attempts to fail. But in four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. When the courts blocked his first haphazard ban on travel to the United States for citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries, for example, his team came up with a version that the Supreme Court let go into effect. force.
Four years of Supreme Court nominations have created an entrenched Republican supermajority that will now, in all likelihood, side with him in some cases he lost, like the June 2020 decision that blocked him from ending to a program protecting from deportation certain people living illegally in the United States after being brought there as children and growing up there.
The personal is political
The administration’s internal resistance to some of its most extreme demands has perhaps been the most significant drag on Mr. Trump’s presidency. A parade of former senior presidential appointees have since warned that he is unfit to be president. They include former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Justice Secretary William Barr, and even more.
Trump denounced them all as weak, stupid and disloyal. He privately told those close to him that his biggest mistakes were the people he appointed, particularly his choice for attorney general. If he wins another term, the advisers who remained with him are determined that there will be no officials who intentionally obstruct his agenda.
In addition to developing policy, a coalition of think tanks has built a database of thousands of potential recruits for Mr. Trump’s transition team if he wins the election. Similar efforts are being made by former senior Trump administration officials to prepare the government for lawyers who can bless the White House’s radical ideas rather than raise legal objections.
This article was first published in the New York Times.