Führer, (“Leader”), title used by Adolf Hitler to define his role of absolute authority in Germany’s Third Reich (1933–45).
On January 20th Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. He will be our first American dictator.
Definition of a Dictator:
A dictator is an individual who forms a government where they make decisions without effective constitutional limitations. The dictator has absolute power. They are not held accountable for their actions and are free to do as they please, including limiting citizens’ freedom and rights.
Dictators usually resort to force or fraud to gain despotic political power, which they maintain through the use of intimidation, terror, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. They also employ techniques of mass propaganda in order to sustain their public support.
Definition: President of a Constitutional Democracy:
Presidential democracy is a form of government in which a president serves as both the head of state and the head of government, operating independently of the legislative branch. This system is characterized by a clear separation of powers, where the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are distinct and provide checks and balances on each other. The president is typically elected by the public and holds significant authority in executing laws and managing government functions.
In a constitutional democracy there are limits on the power of a president. There is a separation of powers, a check and balance system, the president is not supposed to interfere with the rights of Americans such as the right to free speech and peaceful protest, and the president is not above the law. All of these will be violated by Trump starting on Day One. We know this based on his past behavior, threats and promises for revenge, the fact that the man who wrote Project 2025, Russell Vought, who is all in on deconstructing our government, will likely be installed in the Office of Management and Budget , the House and Senate are subservient to Trump, and the Supreme Court has 5 rightwing justices who will aide and abet Trump’s violation of the law and assertion of power.
Donald Trump’s [first] four years in office were marked by gross abuses of executive power, including efforts to trample protest and dissent — key freedoms at the heart of our participatory democracy. He deployed federal agents and surveillance to silence Black Lives Matter protesters or anyone he deemed to oppose his policies, threatened to use his power as president to punish his political enemies, and attacked journalists who criticized him. If elected to a second term, we expect the Trump administration to double down on attempts to further limit our First Amendment rights and use the power of the federal government to attack political rivals, stifle dissent, and undermine checks and balances on presidential power. [ACLU]
Trump was the perfect choice to spearhead the takeover of our country and turn it into a dictatorship because he has the personality traits shared by most dictators: paranoid, vindictive, malignant, narcissistic, and corrupt. He will demand total loyalty to himself instead of the constitution and laws that he will cynically swear to uphold on January 20th.
The dictator demands total loyalty from his cabinet picks so that he can be in charge of everything. The people Trump has picked to put into power are refusing to say whether they would refuse to follow an illegal order from Trump. They deflect those questions by saying: “That’s a hypothetical”. They have been coached to say that. Get real. What they are telling us is that they will follow Trump’s orders without regard for the legality. They were hand picked to do that.
After he takes office, Trump has warned he will engage in a rapid shock and awe campaign to quash resistance to him, create fear, investigate people who investigated him, fire knowledgeable government workers and rush to do one of the things that he convinced the people who voted for him that he would do to make their lives better- namely, deport people who are illegal and broke the law.(Crossing the border illegally or overstaying your visa is a crime just in case you thought they weren’t going to go after your mother because she got here 20 years ago and didn’t commit any MORE crimes). Spoiler alert: rounding up these poor people won’t make anyone’s life better. But if his tariffs and continued tax cuts for the rich wreck the economy he was elected to fix, Trump will claim he did what Americans elected him to do when it comes to the border.
REPUBLICANS HAVE ALREADY BEEN DECONSTRUCTING OUR CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY
The rightwing has been working to deconstruct our democracy for a long time–at least 40 to 50 years. Part of the plan was to prove that our system of government didn’t work. To prove that point the Republicans in Congress very consciously refused to work with Democrats on a bipartisan basis. That instilled cynicism in Americans.
Another part of the plan was to target state houses across the country – they shifted state houses to the right in formerly blue states and have been passing legislation to suppress the vote of Democrats, curtail women’s reproductive rights and other human rights. Read David Pepper’s book, “Laboratories of Autocracy” to understand more. He documents how the Republicans took the state house in Ohio and replicated that approach across the country. Republicans were wildly successful at creating red state laboratories of autocracy.
The religious right has also become part of the Republican effort to change our form of government. Read the recent article by Stephanie Mc Crummens, January 9, 2025, in The Atlantic: The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows, about the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic religious movement that has aligned itself with Trump and seeks to destroy the secular state .
I am not being hysterical when it comes to this assault on our constitutional democracy by the rightwing. Some of what I learned about the history and plans of this rightwing effort I learned in an in-person conversation with David Brock, founder of Media Matters and American Bridge PAC, who had himself been part of this rightwing GOP movement when he was younger. He was tasked with finding dirt on Hillary Clinton and when he didn’t find any, the Republicans he worked for encouraged him to make stuff up. The extremists that have taken over the GOP are relentless and will stop at nothing to get and stay in power.
MOVING THE SUPREME COURT TO THE RIGHT
Another part of the plan was to move the Supreme Court more to the extreme right. Citizen’s United permits billions of dollars of dark money to be spent on political campaigns. Behind the scenes, super wealthy rightwing donors like Harlan Crow and others have been wining, dining and buying the support of both Thomas and Alito as has been documented by Pro Publica.
The Federalist Society also worked with Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell to vet and install jurists on the Court who are pro-corporate, pro-wealthy, pro- “a president should be more like king” justices extreme rightwing thinkers than we had seen before. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett fit that description. This Supreme Court is gutting human rights: voting rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and more. They use their judicial power to protect corporate interests. In their recent immunity decision they essentially granted Trump the power to be a dictator by relieving him of consequences for criminal activity committed while in office.
Democrats share some blame for the demise of our democracy because they dropped the ball on running good candidates for open seats in state legislatures. They failed to fight for control of statehouses. They also failed to understand the threat level they faced from Trump and the Republicans. They played nice instead of hardball. They were statesmen instead of ball busters. For example, even now, the Senate (while it was still led by the Democrats for a few months) failed to call in witnesses who could have testified about Pete Hegseth’s drunken behavior and get the testimony of a woman who has made a credible accusation of rape against Hegseth and signed an NDA. That allowed Hegseth to claim the people exposing his shameful behavior were just anonymous nobodies. No. They were not. One was his own mother (who is now pretending she was wrong about her concerns about him.)
Trump’s return is the end game of a bigger plan to consolidate and increase the power of the president into that of a dictator. The nice word for it is “unitary executive”. Don’t be fooled. This was part of the overarching plot to undermine our democratic check and balance system.
THE SUPREME’S IMMUNITY DECISION / FALLOUT FOR JACK SMITH
The Supreme Court became Trump’s co-conspirator or accessory-after-the-fact. It has aided and abetted Trump’s goal of becoming our first dictator. The immunity decision has to be seen in this context. Almost no one in the field of law expected that this Court would rule the way it did on immunity because our founding principle is that no man is above the law and that was always true of the president too. Why else would Richard Nixon have resigned from office? He resigned to avoid prosecution for criminal acts he committed when he was president.
The first big hint that this Supreme Court would undermine that bedrock constitutional concept was the delay the Court engaged in in taking up the election subversion (Jan 6th) case. In that case, Jack Smith invited the Court to rule on the immunity issue quickly. They turned that down. A less extreme Supreme Court faced with that decision, would have quickly rejected hearing the case and sent it back down to Judge Chutkan to try with a short statement that her brilliant and extensive decision about immunity was settled law. That was a clue that this court had something up its sleeve. Then they set the timing to hear the case a long way out on their calendar. Another tell. Then they heard arguments but failed to come out with their decision until the very end of their term. They knew their decision would not be popular. By pushing everything back, they also aided and abetted Trump to get the delay he needed that became his “get out of jail free card”.
The Supreme Court’s job is to interpret the law but the immunity decision created new law–shocking new law. The decision permits a president to commit crimes without facing legal consequences in situations that could arguably be considered official duties. If the president can find a way to claim his action was part of his official role- even if it is a far-fetched or invented connection to his “duties” in the office of president– then the president can break the law with impunity and avoid criminal consequences.
Someone might argue that even if the president avoids consequences for crimes, people following his criminal orders would be subject to criminal sanctions. Not so fast. If the crime is federal, the president can also pardon the person who does his criminal bidding for him. Someone carrying out his orders could get off either with a pardon after the fact or a peremptory pardon “before the fact”.
When Jack Smith dismissed DOJ’s two federal cases against Trump, filed his summary and left town without speaking out publicly, I believe he did that because he totally got it that this Supreme Court would have let Trump off the hook even if the January 6th case had gone to trial, a jury had convicted Trump and sentenced him to prison. Based on their holding in the immunity case, the majority in this Supreme Court would have undone that conviction in a 5 to 4 decision. They would have said Trump was immune from prosecution for acts committed while in office that might be construed as criminal. They most likely would have adopted Trump’s characterization of his mindset that he really thought the election had been stolen from him and he was just doing his due diligence to find the truth as any president would have done.
That thinking is garbage. Trump clearly DID know he lost the election- he was told that over and over by his closest, most trusted aides- and his multiple plots to contest the election were cynical, desperate attempts to stay in power at any cost. Jack Smith got the picture that the Supremes are in bed with Trump and Smith’s investigation and prosecution was being thrown into the dustbin of history–cast aside by a Court that is in on the plot to destroy our constitutional democracy.
WHERE THIS COURT HAS TAKEN US
If you think John Roberts is the chief judge of the Supreme Court you would be wrong. This Court is led by Alito and/or Thomas who have both been bought by the billionaire club. It is undoubtably the most extreme rightwing court we have ever had in the history of our country because it is willing to ditch our constitution to benefit the oligarchy. Big tech and big oil as well as other billionaires are mostly in on this and history should blame them for the end of our system of government with its checks and balances and limits on the power of the president. In other words, the dark forces on the right have won–for now, unless there is a strong backlash to Trump and Americans rise up to reclaim our democracy and constitutional government. I don’t see that happening yet.
This Supreme Court will allow Trump to be the first autocratic leader (dictator) of the United States of America. And Trump is ready made for that role because of who he is- his personality and his motivations fit perfectly with this role. His first term was an audition. He did a great job of breaking down faith in our news media, rule of law, the FBI, DOJ, our allies, and our institutions as all autocrats-to-be do in every recent takeover of countries in Europe like Hungary. It’s done without a coup these days. Trump once said “I alone can fix it.” Those are the words of most dictators-to-be. In his first term he was restrained by more moderate Republicans who stopped him from breaking the law. This time there is no one to provide guardrails for him. He will defy the law whenever it gets in his way. He will claim he is fixing everything, lie about it when he doesn’t, and rely on the weakness of our press, the power of social media, his sycophants, and the willingness of Americans to allow themselves to be deceived.
THE ROLE OF THE OLIGARCHS AND WEALTHY ENTREPRENEURS IN TRUMP’S WIN
There just aren’t enough billionaires and corporate titans of industry to win the presidency without more voters willing to cast their ballots for a would-be dictator. The rightwing harnessed the fears of less educated white men, young men who were angry about not getting ahead, and Americans who were struggling economically because of post pandemic inflation. The rightwing also aligned itself with anti-abortion evangelicals who saw their culture slipping away and wanted a strongman who would help them stop that attrition by overturning the right to an abortion. They appealed to disaffected younger men by promoting juvenile ideas about manhood, glorifying toxic alpha males who are fighters. Trump also appealed to Hispanics who moved 16 to 17 points to the right from 2016 to 2024, by being the alpha male that looked more like a president to them than a joyful Black/ Asian woman who was all in on women’s rights. In short, the rightwing orchestrated an effective backlash movement combining it with their goal of shifting the country towards autocracy/ oligarchy for the benefit of the corporate world. Trump won but only barely by 1.5 %. Not a mandate. But enough movement across the country in almost every district to claim a solid victory. He also benefited from the loss of Democratic voters. 6 million people who had voted for Biden stayed home when it came to Harris.
To top it off, the tech bros led by Elon Musk have jumped all in on the anti-democratic movement. Underlying their willingness to throw our system in the trash is that governmental checks and balances and regulations get in the way of big businesses visionaries who compete globally. Our national governmental system is cumbersome: the filibuster, the need to compromise, the regulations that get in the way of innovation are seen as tiresome impediments for companies that want to be nimble and compete globally. These entrepreneurs want government off their backs so they can pursue their visionary enterprises unrestrained. Our closest competitor, China, has a unitary decider who can change the rules without any fuss. Entrepreneurs like Musk, Bezos, Ramaswamy, Zuckerberg and many others want our country to have a similarly powerful “unitary executive” who will clear the way for explosive, rapid growth for their ventures. These men stand to become the first trillionaires.
What they fail to factor in is that for business to thrive, a country must have reliable rules and laws that are enforced. This could be lost if Trump and his allies deconstruct our constitutional democracy leaving Trump as the sole decider of right or wrong, truth or lies.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Trump will have a honeymoon period. It will take time for him to disappoint Americans who voted for him and are currently hopeful, even ecstatic, about what he can do for the country as a strong man leader. Many Americans were and still are “dictator-curious”. Unlike South Korea or Portugal Americans have not lived through a dictatorship yet. Much will depend on how brutal and despotic Trump decides to be. It will take time for Republicans who voted for him and hope he will be different this time, to realize that this is the same guy he was before but worse; unleashed to do more damage. He will probably bring us the chaos, craziness, corruption and revenge of his first term but on a larger scale. He has more allies who will obey him.
How the future goes will depend on Trump’s actions and the backlash to Trump when he does the awful things that could be coming — like decimating the ranks of knowledgeable government workers and replacing them with yes men, incessantly lying, attacking media and people who do not agree with him, shutting down media outlets he doesn’t like, going after anyone who stands up to him to punish them and scare other people from challenging him, ordering the military to break up peaceful protests, engaging in blatant corrupt practices, or playing let’s make a deal when it comes to giving aid to the victims of the fires in LA instead of simply doing what the federal government should do when there is a disaster- namely, dispense aid, help people in need, and learn what to do differently in the future.
If and when backlash to Trump does happen, the question will be: Will it be strong or weak? Will it be inspirational? Will Americans rise up?
We do not know.
If there are free and fair future presidential elections, the Democratic Party will need a presidential hopeful who is a younger, charismatic and preferably a male leader (our country is too misogynistic to try to win with a woman just yet) who is authentic and articulate and who can excite Americans and overcome rampant cynicism, to come together- promote inclusivity and the common good instead of divisiveness, and reimagine a democratic government that works for working Americans. We will need a pro-democracy movement that wants to reconstruct our government to help working Americans and knows how to get its messages out in social media crawlspaces that are currently overrun by rightwing influencers. We will need a movement that includes younger Americans, Americans of all backgrounds, women, and men alike.
I don’t know if that can happen as long as Trump is alive. Right now the richest guys in the world are in league with him and will help to keep him in power so that they can be in power too. They have a lot of money they can throw at this project.
SOME GOOD NEWS
On the other hand, I also don’t think the rightwing has another person with the cult appeal of Trump. As long as Trump is politically active it may not be possible to reclaim a constitutional democracy but there could be a chance once he is gone or, maybe, if he becomes more obviously and dangerously insane which is likely to happen because he has many of the signs of increasing dementia. (His father died of Alzheimer’s at the age of 93 after a 7 year period of mental decline.)
One more important thing to remember is that Trump’s win is really a victory of the wealthy over working class Americans. It’s part of a long history of struggle between these forces. Working Americans will pay the price for voting for Trump as the little guy always does when the rich guys fool them into voting them into power. This has happened over and over again in the history of the world. It happened in Rome with Caesar. It’s what Karl Marx wrote about. It’s what the French Revolution was about. It’s the tug-of-war between the will to power of the wealthy and the anger of the oppressed. We are in another round of that fight.
Brace yourself. Take care of yourself. Help others in need. Do what you can to be a force for good in your community. Support pro-democracy state and local candidates. Support the ACLU, Democracy Docket, Media Matters and other pro-democracy groups on the frontlines. Spend more time with your friends. What’s coming is going to be really really disgusting. But the worse it gets the more powerful the backlash will be, which is how pro-democracy movements get ignited and gain momentum.