A Clinton presidency, argued Anton, would plunge the nation into an authoritarian progressive dystopia, a secession crisis, or internal collapse. Meanwhile, despite his vulgar and erratic character and lack of government experience, “Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning.” Notwithstanding the manifest risks, maintained Anton, the real-estate mogul and reality-TV star gave hope of preserving America’s constitutional order.
Desperate times, Anton counseled, necessitated desperate measures. He did not call for lawlessness. But by maintaining that Clinton’s election would produce unmitigated catastrophe, he encouraged the notion that all bets were off if she prevailed at the ballot box.
Today’s anti-Trumpers go Anton one better. Whereas he warned of the danger of progressive dictatorship a mere two months before the 2016 election, anti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle. This gives Democrats time to grasp the grave threat and take suitable precautions. But what precautions are suitable to thwart the authoritarian conquest of America?
President Trump has a good chance to prevail in the general election, Kagan stressed. He “enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility.” His presidency witnessed “no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.” And like Hitler in Weimar, Germany, President Trump will benefit from “bipartisan disgust with the political system in general.”
Once elected, Kagan suspected, President Trump will prove unstoppable. Ensconced in the White House, he will exact revenge. President Trump will install loyalists in key positions throughout the federal bureaucracy; like “Hitler’s local gauleiters,” they “will not need explicit instruction.”
Controlled by his appointees, the Justice Department will ramp up prosecutions of the honorable and innocent. President Trump will defy the Supreme Court with impunity. A craven Republican Congress will do nothing to stop the Trump administration, which “will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived.” If Congress seeks to remove him from office, it will again suffer defeat. And Trump voters will back their man as he consolidates dictatorial rule.
State-level Democrats will oppose President Trump in vain, asserted Kagan. Blue-state governors will cower in fear of Trump supporters taking to the streets and of President Trump employing federal power to crush the opposition. By 2026, President Trump’s sweeping control of government will ensure that Republicans win the midterm elections. The republic will be lost.
To Kagan’s dismay, his fellow citizens fail to recognize the looming disaster: “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?” he asks. “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?” Yet, Kagan lamented, instead of “taking every conceivable measure” to save liberal democracy in America, citizens proceed as if 2024 represented an ordinary presidential election.
Kagan’s prophesy of apocalypse contains pertinent warnings about President Trump’s wretched judgment and conduct on Jan. 6 and the excesses to which President Trump and his base have been prone. But the excesses of Kagan’s argument render his vision of a tyrannical Trump presidency implausible while themselves fostering substantial dangers to democracy in America.
First, history provides scarce evidence of democracies deteriorating into dictatorships without the cooperation of the military, government bureaucracy, business world, media, and universities. Despite Kagan’s lurid speculations, America’s military, well-educated in the laws of war, is unlikely to carry out unlawful presidential orders. Meanwhile, the massive federal bureaucracy is overwhelmingly progressive. The corporate world and Silicon Valley oppose President Trump. The mainstream media (on a good night approximately 1 percent of the nation watches Fox News), Hollywood, and the universities despise him.
Third, as if to confirm Trump voters’ convictions, Kagan himself provides chilling justification for effectively setting aside the rule of law:
It is hard to fault those who have taken President 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.
To insist that Donald Trump’s return to the White House is bound to bring dictatorship to America encourages the use of all means necessary to thwart his bid for the presidency. Flight 93 Election anti-Trumpers thereby facilitate the unraveling of the rule of law that they seek to avert.
