Our old friend Kevin Williamson complains that Donald Trump plans to institute actual tyranny:
Trump has recently intensified his habit of reposting Truth Social content of a barking-mad nature—calling for military tribunals to hear cases against Liz Cheney and Barack Obama, sedition charges against members of the January 6 committee, things of that nature. . . . Trump has recently threatened to imprison political enemies, to pursue treason charges against political opponents and media critics, to hand out life sentences to Mark Zuckerberg (“he will spend the rest of his life in prison”) and anybody else implicated in the same imaginary election-stealing he has been lying about since 2020. . . . This is bananas stuff. Trump is a would-be caudillo, but his cowardice has largely spared us having to fight him, because he prefers to hide behind lawyers and then, after his lawyers get laughed out of court, to rage about the judges from the safe remove of social media. He is the Walter Mitty of Augusto Pinochets . . .
The guy is talking about convening military tribunals and capital charges (treason is a death-penalty offense in the United States) against his political enemies. What does constitutional scholar Ted Cruz have to say about that? What says American patriot Dan Crenshaw? Nobody expects a mess of wilted polyester such as Lindsey Graham to suddenly discover his manhood, but what about Sen. Tom Cotton? Each and every one of these gentlemen is lined up behind a guy who has called for the “termination” of the Constitution so that he can go about setting up his military tribunals and pursuing his vendettas. The cravenness of it all is astounding.
Military tribunals and trumped-up treason charges are not policy debates about which reasonable people can disagree. They are the daydreams of a would-be tyrant. Nothing about the nature or character of the Democratic candidate changes that. Kamala Harris could be Vladimir Lenin himself, and Trump would still be precisely what he is. The fact that this can be said by so few people in the conservative movement—including the leaders of many of its most important organs and institutions—and by almost no one in the Republican Party tells us something we need to know: It isn’t just Donald Trump. None of these people can responsibly be entrusted with real political power.
Now, first of all, when Kevin says that “Kamala Harris could be Vladimir Lenin himself, and Trump would still be precisely what he is,” he can mean one of two things. If he means only that Trump is unfit for the presidency regardless of who his opponent is, I’m with him. Too many of the people lining up behind Trump, or Harris, or Biden have made the category error of assuming that because the opponent is unfit for office, that makes their own candidate fit for office. In fact, in a sane republic with any self-respect, not one of these people would be allowed within 1,000 miles of the White House. As I’ve recently detailed, anyone voting for Trump solely because of how bad Harris is has an obligation to consider what returning Trump to power would look like — and it’s not an optimistic picture. By the same token, I’ve also detailed what an authoritarian menace Harris is, and the grave threat she presents to the survival of our institutions and the rule of law.
On the other hand, if Kevin means to say that there could be no basis for supporting Trump even if the alternative was Lenin, he’s off his gourd. No sensible person would rather live in the Russia of 1920–22 than in the United States of 2017–19. Those of us who profess similar conservative principles and share basic concerns about Trump’s fitness for office should have a certain amount of charity in reading what others in the same boat are saying, so I will assume he’s not actually arguing that.
Consider, however, what he claims about Trump, and take it seriously. There are bad things Trump has done, and bad things he’s tried to do but was stopped (or in some cases talked out of). Attempting to get courts, state legislatures, governors, the vice president, and/or Congress to overturn the 2020 election is at the top of that list — especially his effort to get Mike Pence to not only rule on something that was factually untrue, but legally outside his constitutional powers.
But — and this is important — it is also important to recognize that Donald Trump does not always mean what he says. This should not, by 2024, be a controversial proposition. Trump muses out loud, or engages in trolling, about things to get a rise out of other people even when he would not seriously attempt those things. Again, we should be realistic about what he’s doing when he does this. As I wrote in January:
Trump loves to say ambiguous things and induce his apologists to explain them away, only to then come right out and say, “Yes, I meant it.” (He plainly loves watching Hannity cringe and squirm when he pitches a softball question and Trump refuses to give the easy answer.) Trump also loves to say outrageous things that enrage his opponents, and then not actually do them. What we should not underestimate is the corrosive nature of how Trump uses trolling humor to introduce ideas into the bloodstream of American political discourse through jocular statements that give him deniability while shifting the Overton Window of what things are thinkable to discuss from a presidential podium. His everything-is-negotiable ethos encourages him to think of everything he says as a trial balloon that can be advanced or abandoned later as needed, without committing himself.
That it’s both improper and politically self-defeating for Trump to indulge this habit does not let the rest of us off the hook in the duty to describe responsibly, based upon nine years of observation of the man in the arena of national politics and four years in power, what he is apt to actually do. If you think Trump is actually going to sit down and tell any of his subordinates to try to convene a military commission for Liz Cheney or to draft capital charges against Mark Zuckerberg, I have a bridge to sell you. He never did even try to prosecute Hillary Clinton when there were entirely legitimate grounds for doing so. He has yet to lift a finger to engage the machinery of the criminal-justice system (much less military law enforcement) to do anything as improper against anyone as the charges that were actually brought against Trump by Alvin Bragg, or by Jack Smith in the D.C. case — or that Kamala Harris brought against David Daleiden. It’s reasonable to be worried that a more aggrieved Trump Justice Department in the second term, without the adult supervision of someone such as Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr, will design more legally creative charges, which will require the courts to push back. But it is simply not realistic to paint Trump as a guy who is going to start putting American citizens in gulags.