Over the past week, there was a surge of articles about the danger that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. Trump ratcheted up his threats to punish his enemies and to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists. When his admirer Sean Hannity asked him point blank whether he intended to be a dictator—expecting he would say “of course not”—Trump responded he would be a dictator “only on the first day,” when he would command the completion of the border wall with Mexico and “drill, drill, drill.” Trump’s rhetoric no longer sounds like a normal candidate. But he was never a normal candidate.

Some commentators noted that his threats were unprecedented, yet they barely caused a ripple. He said that certain generals who served him yet denounced him deserved to be executed. What would the press have done if Obama had made such a statement? It would have been front-page news for days, not a blip. Trump has normalized threats of violence. His base has come to expect promises of violence from him. He doesn’t disappoint them.

In his first term, he reached out to some who were not in his personal orbit. He won’t make that mistake if there is a next time.

The article that generated the most attention was written by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, titled “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Ibrvitable. We Should Stop Pretending.”

Kagan was a noted neoconservative but left the GOP in 2016 because he couldn’t accept Trump. His recent article is 7,500 words. I read it late at night and couldn’t sleep. Kagan’s article laid out the case that Trump will win the nomination; that no elected Republican will stand up to him; that he stands a good chance of being re-elected; and that if he is, he will surround himself with toadies and wreak havoc on our democracy. He predicted, as the title says, that Trump would have no guardrails, no respect for the norms of the Presidency, and no regard for the Constitution.

He said that would use the Justice Department to harass and punish his enemies.

A few quotes from his article:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.

Once Trump sweeps Super Tuesday, he writes, Republicans will fall in line behind him and so will big donors. All of the other GOP candidates except Chris Christie will endorse him.

Meanwhile, Biden will have trouble unifying his party. The news media love to run stories about disenchanted Democratic voters who will stay home. Biden faces challenges from third-party candidates, including Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr., and possibly a No Labels candidate like Joe Manchin.

Trump “enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump…

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?
Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

Trump might decide he wants a third term. Who will stop him? The Constitution? The 22nd Amendment? The Congress? Not likely.

Trump as President will pursue those who tried to stop him. He pledged in his Veterans Day speech to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Prepare for a new McCarthyism as Trump and his MAGA lackeys go after the “anti-American” Democrats whom he calls “”Communists,””Marxists,” “Fascists,” and “vermin.”

How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

Kagan says that the odds of a Trump dictatorship are growing by the day. In 2016, it was completely improbable that a man such as trump would win the Republican nomination, and completely unlikely that he would win the Presidency. And it was unthinkable that when he lost in 2020, he would insist that he won in a landslide, and even crazier that his base would believe the Big Lie. Republicans will cower in fear before him; Democrats will protest, maybe take to the streets, but Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to shut them down.

Who will have the courage to stand up to Trump when the risk is not just losing your political office but arrest, detention, public humiliation, and the loss of your freedom?