Trump Is Not a Joke. He's a Dictator Waiting to Strike

The Donald Trump road show is back in action, bringing three rings of outrage from caucuses to courtrooms to primaries — Monday night he was Trumping his way to victory in Iowa, Tuesday morning he was Trumping at a judge in New York, Tuesday night he was Trumping it up at a rally in New Hampshire. His legal troubles are matched only by his presidential primary dominance.

And if you've been following the coverage this week of the Star's reporter on the scenes, Richard Warnica, you might be asking yourself: are Americans really doing this again? Or maybe rather: are Americans really doing this, still?

The one president who has been impeached as many times as all other presidents combined, who faces criminal charges in four different cases, who's recently been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case, who has been found ineligible to run for office again by two other state courts, who led an attempted insurrection after he lost the last election … that president is the odds-on favourite to be returned to office in November's U.S. election.

Apart from generalized fear and loathing, what are Canadians to think of what our American friends are putting themselves through?

What the heck is going on? I was the Star's Washington Bureau Chief for a time during Trump's presidency (and in the aftermath of it) and had lots of time to consider that question. And I was considering it anew talking to Warnica for a This Matters podcast this week about what he's seeing on the road in the U.S.

Apart from generalized fear and loathing, what are Canadians to think of what our American friends are putting themselves through?

First, to temper the loathing (if not the fear), understand that a likely majority of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump, according to polls. My own experience is that among that group, the level of outrage at Trump, and sheer exhaustion with him, is very high.

The problem for them is the substantial minority of their fellow citizens, who both control the Republican party and still approve of Trump. Many fanatically so.

Warnica wrote this week that the other Republican candidates for the presidential nomination seemed to be pitching versions of "Trumpism without Trump: the policy without the drama; the culture war without all the alleged crimes." The problem with that is that for a huge chunk of his supporters, Trumpism is Trump — the policy is irrelevant, the personal drama is the point.

Not everyone voting for Trump shares that cultlike devotion. Lots of otherwise moderate Republicans are willing to hold their nose and vote for him despite their personal distaste for him.

If you're wondering how they can do that, you're in the same camp as former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who voted with Trump more than 90 per cent of the time while he was president, but broke with him (and her party) over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. She's been warning in a book and interviews recently that if Trump wins this election, it could be the last democratic U.S. election — that he'll go full dictator. And if you listen to him in campaign speeches talking about getting revenge on his enemies, pardoning himself and others for crimes, and weaponizing the government to his own ends if he wins again, Cheney's projection doesn't seem all that different than his own.

I think many nonfanatical Americans who will vote for Trump simply don't believe it, despite the evidence. Partly because, as Warnica noted on the podcast, Trump's whole bearing has become so cartoonish that it is hard to see him as credible in any way, never mind as a credible threat. And partly because last time, the worst was averted.

You know how the "Y2K bug" is viewed as kind of a joke in retrospect because we all prepared for the worst and then virtually nothing happened? Well, the truth is that nothing happened precisely because enough people understood the threat and prepared for the worst. It was a reaction that worked, but people remember it as an overreaction because it worked.

Similarly, when Trump tried to steal the last election — just as many had been warning he would — just enough democratic safeguards held up to prevent him from being successful. Because of that, many view it in retrospect as having been no threat at all. All those people who warned of Trump's dangers are seen as having overreacted. And they're seen as doing it again, even if he seems to be openly threatening to be exactly the threat they're warning about.

In other words, some of those who will vote for him do not believe him.

But there's a scarier group: those who do believe him. Those who are voting for him in hopes he'll go full dictator and rain hell down on his enemies, who they perceive to be their enemies too. They are, I think, a surprisingly large group of Trump's most faithful supporters.

Warnica told me of a reflective moment he had in the New York courtroom this week, while noting Trump's buffoonish bearing and the circus atmosphere that follows him. "It's so easy to think it's a cartoon and think it's a joke. And then you bear down on what they're actually talking about in this courtroom, which is that he cornered a woman in the changing room of a lingerie department and brutally sexually assaulted her. And then when she went public, decades later with this, he attacked her online in a way that made her so scared that she bought bullets for a gun that she had inherited from her father, and now sleeps with that gun next to her," Warnica said.

"I think sometimes he is a figure that encourages you to think in the abstract, because he seems so separate from reality. And that anytime you focus down on the reality of what he's done, or what he's saying, or how he's acting, you are face to face with a really tangible horror."

It is true of what's happening in that court case. And true of the election process unfolding outside of it, too.