We know Trump wants to be a dictator. So what are are waiting for?
Donald Trump has learned how to dominate the Republican Party in his quest for absolute power, and we can't waste a moment.
There’s an anecdote about Donald Trump that’s lived in my bones for more than six years now:
“The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in ‘Jurassic Park’ when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors,” recalled [Justin] McConney, who was the Trump Organization’s director of social media from 2011 to 2017. “I was like, ‘Oh no.’”
There are lots of moments that gave us Donald Trump. Yet this is probably the instant that made the rest possible. There is something about him that uses any direct connection to fine-tune his demagoguery, which helps him turn things only he thought were possible into reality.
In 2016, the great George Saunders described Trump’s style and motivation about as effectively as anyone can:
Increasingly, his wild veering seems to occur against his will, as if he were not the great, sly strategist we have taken him for but, rather, someone compelled by an inner music that sometimes produces good dancing and sometimes causes him to bring a bookshelf crashing down on an old Mexican lady. Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?
Maybe our greatest living fiction writer nailed the freaky joy (for some) of watching Trump’s dance with the devil:
It’s oddly riveting, watching someone take such pleasure in going so much farther out on thin ice than anyone else as famous would dare to go.
After eight years, we must recognize that he keeps going farther and farther. And we’re the ones who seem to be plunging into the icy depths.
The disturbing conclusion we must consider is that Trump keeps learning. From that process of going too far and then farther, he is getting better at transmogrifying the discontent and hate generated by our tilted system (built on a neoliberalism that nurtures divisions and refuses to provide stability) into a lust to be dominated. Most terrifyingly, he’s even better at consolidating the power, luring in his fellow billionaires—not to bend at the knee as much as to take a seat at the feast. And what’s for dinner is America’s working class.
Particularly worrisome to me is the way he has consolidated his control of a Republican Party that was already structured to manufacture automatons.
“Did you hear we have another member? We have 221 members,” Rep. RYAN ZINKE (R-Mont.) recently said. “Trump’s in the House on every issue.”
Though he meant it as a joke, it’s an instructive one about how the president-elect is approaching the transition period as Republicans prepare to take control of both chambers on Capitol Hill.
Trump’s primary focus is expending enough political capital to ensure that his Cabinet picks make it through the confirmation process so that the admin can start delivering on his campaign pledges ASAP.
Maybe Matt Gaetz was meant to be the first bird of the wire who’d take all the arrows. He was impossible to confirm in a obscene way but in need of a flashy exit due to charges of rape and child trafficking.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice, and Kash Patel, for FBI Director, should be just as impossible to confirm for issues directly related to the Constitution.
Hegseth is precisely the guy you’d pick if you were an aspiring dictator who wants to exploit the holes that have been drilled in our Constitution to turn the military on American Citizens. The Guardian reports:
In one of his five published books he wrote that in the event of a Democratic election victory in the US there would be a “national divorce” in which “The military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”
Thus far—perhaps because of allegations of drunkenness and sexual assault—this fatally flawed nomination has not been connected at all with Project 2025’s effusive boosting of the Insurrection Act or Trump’s assault on the apolitical bulwarks of the military.
It’s perhaps even more that concerning Kash Patel—who seems less like a human and more like an avatar of Trump’s desire to seek revenge against anyone who attempted to apply the rule of law to him—hasn’t been laughed out of the Senate despite reams of threats to the media for doing the basic things any journalist should be doing. His public record should prevent him from doing any job that doesn’t involve podcasting. And as of now, he seems to be on a path to confirmation.
An apolitical military and a somewhat free and independent media—along with functioning courts—are the core of what we have to protect us from a dictatorship, as Andrea Pitzer explained in the first episode of Next Comes What:
All of them are now under direct assault, and we can’t even get leading Democrats to stop pretending DOGE has anything to do with better government rather than just being the Destruction of Government by Elon (DOGE).
Trump exploits vulnerabilities. Our greatest weakness right now is our urge to return to normal. It’s all we want, and I get it. But that’s not what’s happening. We lost that. And our denial of what we lost leads us to waste our greatest gift right now—time to prepare.
Trump is getting better at this. And that’s not normal. It’s time we understood what that means.
In How to Survive This Mess, Pitzer talks about the “incredible gift” of time we have to prepare for Trump’s second stab at dictatorship. But that time is quickly passing.
All of the connections we built to take on Trump still exists and are formalized through groups like Indivisible and Democracy Docket. But I’m genuinely worried that we’re not seeing a new awakening. I’m not saying we need another Women’s March or to be inspired by the incredible activism around Standing Rock that was happening in December of 2017. But we do need people to break out of their despair and denial. There’s so much we can do. Special elections are coming in Virginia. A crucial Supreme Court election in Wisconsin is just around the corner.
The lack of focus around the attempt to steal another crucial state supreme court seat in North Carolina is especially concerning.
Again, I get it. We don’t deserve this and we don’t want it. But it’s the time we’ve been given. But, as Pitzer notes in the lastest episode of Next Comes What, “nobody is asking you to go on strike in an Arctic concentration camp. Nobody is asking you to sew crafts to support your family while being tortured in a Chilean detention camp.”
At least not yet.
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