Do not remain calm. A second Trump presidency really will be that bad

Open this photo in gallery:

No, it is not going to be okay.

With a second Donald Trump presidency seeming more and more likely – as the Democratic campaign implodes, as public opinion in key states rallies, as Trump-friendly judges remove each legal obstacle to his return to power – there has been a corresponding rise in the number of commentary pieces suggesting that the prospect, if not exactly welcome, is nothing to get too worked up about.

Calm down, they say. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe he’s mellowed. Maybe he’s changed. The former president’s recent brush with death is often cited, without evidence, as having given him new perspective. Certainly the Republican Party, at this week’s convention, was at pains to create this impression. A camera was trained on Mr. Trump throughout, showing him smiling benevolently on the proceedings, like a kindly orange sun.

There were no mentions of the “stolen” 2020 election, scarcely more of his “right to go after” his enemies, or “retribution,” or similarly unsettling entries in Mr. Trump’s long catalogue of grievance and resentment; nothing about his demands for the constitution to be “terminated,” or protesters “shot.” In his speech to the convention on Thursday evening, he even went so far as to say that he was running to be “president for all Americans” (right after declaring that America was bound together by a “single faith”).

And besides, how much can he really do? How much did he do, in his first term? The same guardrails will keep him contained as did then: the courts, the Congress, his staff, the media, the business community, and in the final analysis, the voters. So let’s not have all this panicky talk about dictatorships and the end of democracy. American democracy has survived civil war, the Depression and multiple presidential assassinations. It can survive Mr. Trump. Calm down.

“Another four years of Trump is not enough time to turn America into a dictatorship,” a Brookings Institution scholar offers, soothingly. True, Mr. Trump has a four-year head start. “But he is still a long way off from achieving total control over U.S. institutions, media and the judiciary, or building the kind of social consensus he’d need to reign as an autocrat.”

“Pearl-clutching about a Trump victory ignores the strength of our democracy,” writes a Democratic (!) Congressman from Maine. “In 2025, I believe Trump is going to be in the White House. Maine’s representatives will need to work with him when it benefits Mainers.”

“Western liberalism has been under threat before from isolationism, protectionism, Bolshevism and fascism,” writes a National Post columnist. “It has adapted and survived, and it will again … Trump will test the guardrails imposed by the Founding Fathers. But they are robust.”

It’s easy to see the appeal of this line of thinking, even among Mr. Trump’s critics. It’s natural to want things to work out, and to rearrange your expectations to fit your desires. It is pleasing to the ego as well. To make the case for calm, even as disaster looms, makes one sound grown-up. It suggests a seen-it-all steadiness, steelier nerves, superior wisdom, in all a readiness to stand apart from the panicking crowd.

It is hard, by contrast, to stare into the abyss. It’s unpleasant to consider just how bad things could get. It connotes negativity, pessimism, a certain Eeyore-like moroseness. The mind rebels, wandering off in search of ways to deflect, to normalize.

You can see this in much of the media coverage. Over the years, Mr. Trump has benefited from any number of different media habits – reflexes, really, born not of any overt bias toward him, God knows, but of the needs of storytelling and the canons of traditional journalism: the thirst for narrative, the impulse to “balance,” the desire for novelty. So, for example, Mr. Trump’s avalanche of lies, threats, mental breakdowns, ignorant outbursts, racist winks, incitements to violence and so on, any one of which would sink any other candidate, pass without comment on the grounds that they are “not news.”

They might be news if his behaviour were worse than expected – for the measurement of everything, not against what is right, but what is expected, is another media habit, as it absolves us from having to make value judgments – but Mr. Trump has so successfully lowered expectations that it is virtually impossible for him to fall short of them.

Still, even in this context it is hard to fathom how the media can so often fall for the “new Trump” routine. We cannot help ourselves, it seems: the unquenchable thirst for narrative has us too tightly in its grip. In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, you saw several examples of this: in addition to the “changed man” bunkum, there was the unquestioning repetition of the instant Republican talking point, that this was all because of media and Democratic criticism of Mr. Trump; the consequent calls for “unity” and “turning down the heat”; the admiring commentary about his clenched fist as he rose from the ground, his cries of “fight, fight” and the “iconic” photo of the scene; the predictions that he would receive a massive boost in the polls in response.

It was all rubbish, of course. There’s no evidence the shooter was influenced by anything more than the desire to get his name in the papers. The incident has had no appreciable effect on the polls. The pose, and the chant – fight whom? fight what? – were the usual meaningless posturing, a moment of instinctive self-dramatization and nothing more. (Likewise the photo: it was prettily composed, but so what?) The problem facing America, last, is not a lack of “unity.” It is that one of the parties has lost its mind. It has surrendered itself utterly to a con man and psychopath, who has turned it into a machine for dictatorship. It is not “turning up the heat” to point this out. It is turning on the lights.

But narrative demanded otherwise. Narrative dictated the storyline, of the hero, brought low, rising undaunted. Narrative demanded that he be applauded for his courage. Narrative demanded that we all learn a sobering lesson. And narrative demanded that the hero, saved by a quirk of fate – or is it destiny? – emerge a changed man.

If there were any prospect of Mr. Trump having changed, if there were any likelihood that he would have given up on his authoritarian project, if it were even possible to divert the Republican Party from the course it is now on, the convention would have been the place to offer evidence of that.

But if the rhetoric was tempered – somewhat: Again, the party, like Mr. Trump, benefits from being graded on a curve – the underlying reality was not. At the convention, there was the usual Trumpworld retinue of fanatics, self-promoters, election deniers, Russian assets, lunatics and thugs, many of them convicted felons or indicted as such. One, Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s former trade adviser and coup plotter, had just been released from jail: the convention gave him the loudest ovation of all. As both a convicted and indicted felon himself – he is out on bail in three jurisdictions and awaiting sentencing in a fourth – Mr. Trump was supposedly forbidden from talking to any of them, though he undoubtedly ignored this restriction, as he does most laws.

There was the unforgettable sight of the entire convention chanting, feverishly, “SEND THEM BACK” while waving their “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs – a reference to Mr. Trump’s proposal to round up 15 million undocumented immigrants and contain them in vast internment camps, prior to deportation. It’s a scheme so mad, so draconian, so wholly unenforceable except by resort to still more draconian supporting measures, as to fully vindicate the worst fears about his presidency all on its own.

There was, of course, the choice of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate. Much attention has focused on the remarkable flexibility of his views – his conversion, on the road to a Senate seat and Mr. Trump’s endorsement, from thoughtful social observer to hard-line theocrat, from mainstream national-security conservative to purblind isolationist (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” is a quote for the ages), from scorching critic of Mr. Trump to slavish adulator. Suffice it to say that Moscow was overjoyed at his selection.

But what is most precisely relevant is his willingness to facilitate Mr. Trump’s ambitions. He is on record, not only that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, but that had he been vice-president, he would have done what even faithful Mike Pence would not: reject the certification of Electoral College votes if they were not to Mr. Trump’s advantage, recognize “alternate” pro-Trump electors instead, and throw the election to the House of Representatives to decide. He is also on record encouraging Mr. Trump to defy the Supreme Court, in the unlikely event it should find against his plans to fire tens of thousands of professional civil servants and replace them with his personal loyalists.

There is reason to believe this turn toward autocracy is not merely opportunistic, but reflects his sincere personal beliefs: he is a protégé of Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire with pronounced anti-democratic views, and a follower of Curtis Yarvin, another tech entrepreneur whose views have been described as “neo-monarchist” – one of many among the dark right who have given up on democracy.

Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Vance – at the urging, reportedly, of such luminaries as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson – is therefore noteworthy, and disturbing. It is not an attempt, as most vice-presidential picks are, to balance the ticket, or to reach out to the centre, still less to assure the nation of a seasoned replacement (Mr. Vance has little to no relevant experience) in the event of his death. It is a signal to the party – this is what I believe – and whither he goes, goes the party.

To shrug at the threat Mr. Trump represents, then, in the face of all that we know about his past record, and all that he and the people around him have said about their intentions, is to ignore the logic of autocracy: specifically, its inherent momentum, the self-reinforcing tendency of power, once accumulated, to accumulate still further, and for opposition to disperse.

Perhaps you were struck by the sight, on the convention’s second night, of that parade of Mr. Trump’s former rivals – Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, even Nikki Haley, all of whom, like Mr. Vance, were once among his fiercest Republican critics – competing to prostrate themselves before him. But of course they did. Mr. Trump owns the party now. There would be no future for them in politics if they did not.

What you were watching was a dress rehearsal for what is in store for society at large. Already you can see potential sources of opposition – in business, in the media, even that Democratic Representative from Maine – considering their options. Do they really want to get offside with a man who will probably soon be the most powerful person on Earth – a man who has not been shy about abusing his power in the past, and seems to have shed any remaining reservations about abusing it in future?

The closer we get to November, and the more probable a Trump election, the more pronounced this trend is likely to be. The more it looks like Mr. Trump cannot be stopped, the more people will give up trying – indeed, the more rapidly they will scramble to get onside. Stock market analysts call it a panic rally: the later you are to buy in, the higher the price. And the more that people align themselves with Mr. Trump, the more exposed the remaining dissenters will be.

Once he has been elected, this can only accelerate. The guardrails, already buckling, will collapse altogether. Or which of them do you suppose will still contain him? The courts? Even as a private citizen, he has successfully defied them: intimidated jurors, threatened judges’ family members, violated any number of contempt orders, all with relative impunity. He will probably get off with a slap on the wrist in the “hush money” case (would you want to be the judge who sentenced him to jail?) while the other three will not go to trial before the election – and probably not even after.

The judges he appointed in his first term have already demonstrated their loyalty – in the dismissal of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and even more in the Supreme Court’s ruling granting him lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution (albeit only for “official acts”). Is it to be imagined they will act any differently once he is back in power, and stacking the courts with hundreds more like them?

The Congress, then: perhaps it will act in its traditional role as a check on executive power. But the Republicans may well win control of both houses, and even if they do not: what remains of the separation of powers, with a president who has no more respect for constitutional norms than any other kind? Remember: it’s only a convention that we obey the law.

Would a president prepared to defy the Supreme Court be any less shy about defying Congress? Would a president immune from prosecution – a president as unhinged as Mr. Trump – have any compunction about intimidating members of Congress into line? It needn’t be anything too vulgar. The threat of prosecution, by the Justice Department he has said he would weaponize against his foes, should suffice.

Perhaps the fourth estate will continue to offer criticism. But the media are vulnerable – not just to the prosecution he has also promised for certain journalists, but via their nervous owners, whose taxes could always be audited, whose assets could always be confiscated.

Who else, then? The bureaucracy? But they’re all going to be replaced. His own staff? But there will be no babysitters this time, no John Kelly or James Mattis, but rather fervent MAGA zealots like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon or Michael Flynn.

Oh, I know: the voters. Democracy will be saved by … democracy. But we already know how Mr. Trump intends to dispose of that obstacle. We saw it on Jan. 6. From a report in The New York Times, we know that plans are well-advanced to replicate it this time: Republican lawyers and activists have already filed dozens of lawsuits alleging irregularities, with many more to come, in an attempt to tie the process in knots, delay the counting of votes, and once again throw the election to the House.

And should Mr. Trump be elected, by fair means or foul, you may be sure something similar is planned for 2028. It isn’t that there will be no more elections, as such. They hold elections in Russia. It is that they will no longer be elections where the outcome is in much doubt.

So no, everything is not going to be okay. I don’t mean to suggest any of this is inevitable. There are many ways Mr. Trump’s plans could still fail. Events, dear boy, and all that. But we cannot simply assume they will, or that a constitutional architecture designed to frustrate ordinary power-seekers will thwart a supervillain with Mr. Trump’s remarkable talents.