Don’t kid yourself – the threat of a Trump dictatorship is real

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Has Godwin’s law been repealed?

In normal times, the famous maxim – that the longer any argument online progresses, the greater the odds that someone will compare someone or something to Hitler – should be taken not only as a description but a prescription. As in: Don’t do this. People will not take you seriously if you do. Your point is made much better without such obviously extreme, even obscene comparisons. Nobody is like Hitler.

But what do you do with someone who positively seems to invite the drawing of such parallels – who parrots the same phrases, invokes the same threats, advances the same arguments, and seems hell-bent on installing himself as dictator? It’s probably still best to avoid the H word. But as a description of what a second Donald Trump administration would look like, the F word – fascist – seems increasingly apt.

The former president has always seemed to teeter on the verge of madness, but in recent weeks his rhetoric has noticeably worsened. He appears to be on an escalatory spiral, unable to extract the same thrill out of the merely shocking or unhinged and needing to ratchet it further into the violent and depraved.

The historical undertones are unmistakable, and almost certainly intended: promising to root out the “vermin” that threaten the United States “from within,” attacking immigrants for “poisoning the blood” of America, vowing to use the FBI and the justice system to “go after” his rivals, asserting that a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, should be “executed” for “treason,” praising foreign dictators like Xi Jinping of China for their “strength.”

As always with Mr. Trump, the sheer volume of his assaults on decency overwhelms and numbs the senses. Statements that would bring American politics to a dead stop in any previous era pass all but unmarked, overtaken within hours by the next outrage, and the next.

Rather than grow more alarmed, the instinct remains to minimize, to dismiss, to normalize. It’s all just shock talk, say his apologists. He doesn’t mean it. Or at any rate, he can’t actually do it. The system will stop him. The “guardrails” will hold.

Mr. Trump’s critics comfort themselves with similar assurances. He’s going to jail. He can’t win a general election. He’s disqualified from office under the 14th amendment, as the Supreme Court will surely rule.

All of these are possible. Some may even be probable. But they are far from certainties. Indeed, with every incendiary statement and every criminal indictment, Mr. Trump’s popularity seems only to have grown. Not only is he running away with the Republican nomination, but he now leads Joe Biden in the polls.

We do ourselves no favours, then, if we do not take seriously the possibility that Mr. Trump means it, and what is more, that he can get away with it. Because this is not only about Mr. Trump. There is a larger context to his rise, and others who share his aims – or indeed have much broader ambitions.

There are first the ideological underpinnings. Do a search some time for “red Caesarism.” A significant section of Republican thought leaders have persuaded themselves that the republic, or at least their own place in it, is under such threat – from Marxists, or Black activists, or immigrants, or what have you – that it can only be saved by something resembling dictatorship, even if they do not call it that.

There is, second, the coming purge of the bureaucracy. A second Trump administration, his supporters have not been shy about revealing, would begin by replacing thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists. Particular attention is being paid to staffing the Justice Department with lawyers willing to give a veneer of legality to Mr. Trump’s lawless agenda.

At the moment that agenda might be limited to revenging himself on his enemies and shutting down all criminal proceedings against him. But beyond that lurk far worse prospects – again, by his followers’ own admission: interring undocumented immigrants in massive camps; jailing journalists and other critics; calling up the military to suppress protests, and so on.

The steadier hands that attempted to rein in Mr. Trump in his first term would not be back for a second. Only his most fervent admirers and fanatical lieutenants would remain. And at the centre would be Mr. Trump himself: emboldened by success, more dominant than ever, and unbound altogether by any constraint, whether of law, morals, shame or even rational self-interest.

This is ultimately Mr. Trump’s greatest strength: his refusal to respect any limit. Guardrails only work against those who ultimately agree to be bound by them. When the Supreme Court told Richard Nixon to hand over the Watergate tapes, he handed them over. One supposes Mr. Trump’s response would be something along the lines of “how many divisions does the Supreme Court have?”