Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Feb. 8, in Palm Beach, Fla.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
There has never been a candidate for president like Donald Trump, and there has never been a campaign for president like the one he is now running. The message of his campaign is, without exaggeration: Elect me and I will break the law. The mandate he is seeking is a mandate for lawlessness.
In part this is implicit in the very fact of his candidacy, even as he faces 91 felony charges in four separate cases:
- for paying hush money to a porn star with whom he had been having an affair, then falsifying his business records to cover up the payment, in an effort to defraud voters in 2016;
- for absconding with, improperly handling and refusing to hand over top-secret government documents after leaving office;
- for attempting to intimidate election officials in Georgia, as part of a campaign to overturn the 2020 election result in that state; and
- for the broader campaign to do the same nationwide: falsely claiming election fraud, pressuring state officials to set aside the results on this basis, proffering slates of fake “alternate” electors in swing states in place of those the voters had elected, culminating in the attempt to coerce the vice-president into endorsing the scheme, not least by means of the violent mob that assembled at Mr. Trump’s invitation on Jan. 6, 2021, and later invaded the Capitol.
All these, of course, are in addition to the civil judgments, already rendered, finding that Mr. Trump raped the journalist E. Jean Carroll and defamed her by denying it (damages: more than US$88-million), and that Mr. Trump and his flagship business, the Trump Organization, carried on a massive fraud scheme over many years (damages: still to be assessed).
No one should be in any doubt about what a Trump victory would mean for the criminal cases against him: Where a verdict has not been rendered, or where the case is still under appeal, he will order the Department of Justice to drop the charges; where necessary, he will pardon himself, though there is no basis in law for a president to do this; where the case is before a state, rather than federal, court – hence ruling out a pardon, at least in theory – he will simply refuse to acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction, on the same preposterous claim of “presidential immunity” with which he is now seeking to escape justice in the Jan. 6 case.
But Mr. Trump is not just seeking absolution for past crimes; he is seeking, quite explicitly, a licence to commit more. His frantic online campaign warning of the dire consequences that would follow if a president were not granted “complete and total immunity” from all criminal charges, even for activities that “cross the line,” is only tangentially directed at the judge and jury in the Jan. 6 case (though it may well be aimed at intimidating them). It is intended to persuade the public he should not be held to account for any future crimes, either.
Neither should anyone be in any doubt what he would do with such a mandate. He and his acolytes have not been shy about their intentions. Not content with using the powers of office to set aside the charges against him, he would direct Justice officials – improperly, to be sure, but any officials who might have resisted will have been replaced by loyalists – to take revenge on his antagonists: prosecutors, plaintiffs, journalists, and of course Joe Biden: for the doctrine of presidential immunity, it would seem, applies only to presidents named Trump.
How much further he would go we can only speculate. The public has already been treated to the sight of Mr. Trump’s lawyers arguing, in a court of law, that he could not be prosecuted even for ordering a team of Navy SEALs to assassinate a political rival – not unless he had previously been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Which naturally led to discussion of the logical dilemma this implied: Who would vote to convict a president who had the authority to murder his opponents?
The point is with Mr. Trump there are no limits, nothing that can be ruled out. The past eight years have been one long litany of lines being drawn that Mr. Trump would never cross, only to have him cross them; of predictions that this latest bit of line-crossing would surely be the end of him, only to have him survive, and grow stronger. All of which has only served to further embolden him, and corrupt his followers. When he said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, he was, for once, telling the truth.
It is the failure to grasp the completeness of Mr. Trump – how wholly vile he is, how utterly devoid of even normal human impulses, let alone human virtues – that consistently undermines attempts to come to grips with him, or the threat he poses. The tendency is always to consign him to some conventional category of villain. But he is not merely a crook or a bully, a simpleton or an ignoramus, a sexual predator or a racist thug. It is not even quite right to call him a fascist, though he has all of the fascist’s atavistic instincts. Even fascists have programs of government.
He is rather, as I have written before, a revolutionary nihilist. Here again, this does not stem from any actual idea about, well, anything. It is merely an extension of what the conservative lawyer and prominent Trump critic George Conway rightly calls his narcissistic psychopathy. That Mr. Trump exists to serve Mr. Trump and only Mr. Trump is a given. But it is the corollary – that the fulfilment of his need for self-affirmation requires the negation of everything else: literally every institution, law, norm or principle of human decency, without exception – that is the secret to his success.
Were this negation less complete – were he to yield anything to conventional morality, to acknowledge any reservations in any matter, from the smallest impropriety to the gravest crime – Mr. Trump’s powers would collapse. The minute he agreed to be held to any exterior standard, he would be conceding the legitimacy of such standards – of the whole concept of standards. Give him this: he never does. His commitment is absolute. In any given situation, he will always – always – do the opposite of what law or custom or decency would suggest.
No previous president bears any comparison, for whatever their faults, they had also compensating virtues. Richard Nixon was a crook, but also a man of high intelligence and considerable accomplishment who worked hard for everything he had. Bill Clinton was unprincipled and incontinent, but also a brilliant orator and a skilled politician, with a broad and humane vision of society. Woodrow Wilson was a racist, but also a distinguished scholar and successful statesman. Mr. Trump has all of their flaws, and none of their virtues. He is all flaw.
Could he, then, make himself dictator? If you mean would he do so, if he could, I don’t think anyone even bothers to deny it. The only question is whether anyone can stop him. Just now we are witnessing the instruments of American justice attempting to deal with the manifest challenge Mr. Trump presents, with uncertain results. In each of his multiple criminal and civil cases, Mr. Trump has routinely insulted judges, threatened prosecutors and disrupted the proceedings, largely without consequence.
Probably not even this Supreme Court would go so far as to endorse Mr. Trump’s theory of presidential immunity – not just immunity from civil suits for official acts, such as the courts have long assigned to sitting presidents, but immunity from criminal charges for any acts, even those taken after they are president. But the court seems unwilling to stand behind another guardrail, the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition from public office of those who, having sworn an oath to the Constitution, engage in insurrections against it.
So, probably, Mr. Trump will stand trial for his part in the Jan. 6 coup attempt before the November election. He may even be convicted by then. The accusation alone would have been enough to consign any previous candidate to the dustbin, long before this. But not only will Mr. Trump, in all likelihood, be the Republican candidate, even as a convicted felon. He may yet win.
Yes, in some polls a substantial portion of current Trump voters say they would abandon him if he were actually convicted of a crime. That’s what they say now. But in the event? Past experience with Mr. Trump shows that what was unthinkable in advance quickly becomes thinkable in actuality. All that’s needed is for someone to think it.
First Mr. Trump tried to overturn American democracy. Now he is attempting to undermine the rule of law. But his real achievement is to have corrupted so many in his party; that objective having been attained, he may yet succeed at the others. The founders never anticipated quite such a monster: an utter psychopath, possessed of great wealth, with an unshakable base of popular support. Any two of these, and the guardrails would probably hold. But all three?
This is a crisis, needless to say, not only for the United States, but the democratic world. Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, described a nightmarish historical counterfactual: What if, instead of Franklin Roosevelt being re-elected in 1940, the famous aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had been? What if, that is, the U.S. president in the Second World War had been on the side of the bad guys?
That is, potentially, the nightmare that now confronts us: For a second Trump presidency would not merely mean an attempt to impose a dictatorship on the United States, but an open alliance with the world’s other dictatorships. The democracies would not merely be in the position of having to defend themselves without the aid of the United States, but from the United States.
There is no sense pretending otherwise. The phrase “Trump-proofing” has entered the language to describe the foreign-policy challenge this presents, as if anyone had the first clue how. But the first step is acknowledging the reality of the situation – and being prepared to say so openly. People who still discuss the issue in terms of whether a peevish Mr. Trump might impose tariffs on our exports if we say bad things about him need to give their heads a shake. If Mr. Trump returns, tariffs will be the least of our problems.
The situation would be vastly worse than in the first Trump presidency, when there were still people around him in a position to rein him in. There will be no such human guardrails in a second Trump administration. The first Trump presidency was a crisis. The second will be an emergency.