Trump Is a Liar and an Autocrat—Do Not Trust Him, But Believe Him

Ezra Klein has become a very influential political commentator. He listens well to the experts with whom he regularly speaks, and he thinks for himself. He is right about many things. But his most recent New York Times column, “Don’t Believe Him,” is too clever by at least half, minimizing the danger posed by the Trump administration at a time when the danger has never been greater.

Klein’s argument is simple: Trump’s current onslaught against “the deep state” is less a show of strength than a Steve Bannon-inspired effort to “flood the zone” with executive orders and monopolize public attention in the absence of either a strong governing majority or a clear governing agenda. Klein notes that some of these efforts have already failed, and he insists that many more will prove ineffective. While Trump poses as an all-powerful dictator, Klein insists, he is merely working overtime to keep American citizens “off balance” because his power is limited, and his “overreach” will eventually produce an electoral reckoning.

Klein is not the only commentator to emphasize Trump’s limits. And limits there surely are. At the same time, I am aware of no serious commentator who has attributed to Trump God-like powers to literally dictate the future.

Trump is no God.

But he is the recently installed President of the United States, and thus the occupant of the single most powerful political office in the world, invested by Constitution and statute with enormous authority as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief. Klein insists that Trump’s executive orders are a symptom of his inability to govern via legislation. But his executive orders carry enormous weight, and are already wreaking havoc and engendering confusion and anxiety.

There will be chaos. There will be ineptitude. There will be a surplus of cruelty.

It is only the second week of Trump’s four-year term—with over two hundred weeks to come– and he has already gutted key government agencies responsible for protecting civil rights and public health; issued executive orders that threaten public education and academic freedom; and generated enormous insecurity and fear among the tens of millions of Americans who are in the actual or potential cross hairs of his promise to detain and deport what he calls “illegals.” He has gotten major media outlets to bend the knee. And has used his attention-mongering bully pulpit to defame and bully critics, and to poison public communication with lies about how “DEI” is responsible for California wildfires and DC plane crashes.

Trump is not as powerful as he says he is (what megalomaniacal narcissist is as powerful as he imagines himself to be?).

But who is more powerful?

Does faith that Trump will inevitably overreach generate counter-power? Does credulity about mid-term elections, or encomiums to the Constitution or the civic virtue of ordinary Americans? Can the courts be relied on to countermand the wide range of Trump’s dangerous political appointments and executive orders, which fall pretty squarely within the extraordinary discretionary power that U.S. presidents possess?

It is comforting to imagine that Trump faces the normal legal and political constraints that confront every president.

A recent Timeseditorial criticizing Trump’s barrage of executive orders states this view well: “American voters gave President Trump and his party the right to push forward the agenda he campaigned on. If the president wants to shrink the federal work force, end programs he disagrees with or revamp oversight, he has the license to pursue those efforts. Yet he must do so legally and by operating inside the system of checks and balances that has guided the country since its founding.”

But what is the force of the “must” here?

Surely Trump must proceed legally if he wishes to respect the law. But, as seems clear, he does not wish to respect the law. Must he? Who or what is going to make him?

Indeed, it is delusional to believe that Trump’s campaign agenda is one thing, and his lawlessness something else. For Trump’s entire campaign centered on retribution and revenge, on destroying an opposition described as vermin, and on completely overthrowing institutions that he described as tyrannical. Trump is doing what he promised to do and what he won the November election by promising to do—and that he made other bogus claims about inflation and prosperity is completely beside the point.

Trump’s blanket pardon to over 1500 J-6 insurrectionists was simply the most outrageous expression of a contempt for liberal democracy that has long defined his political persona. At a televised Univision Town Hall in the weeks before the election, Trump offered this defense of the J-6 insurrectionists: “They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came . . . There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. . . . that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands.”

Read that again. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.” He is talking about the Capitol police. “They” were armed. But “we”—the insurrectionists”—were not. Could it have been said any more clearly? He was telling the whole world where he stood—with the mob who stood with him, and against due process and law enforcement and the constitutional democracy.

Is Trump omnipotent? No.

Will he succeed in doing all that he has promised? It’s not likely—though he might very well succeed in doing much of what he has promised, and he is already off to a strong start.

He has the power to fire two dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on J-6, and to purge thousands of FBI agents and career Justice staff who worked in support of the J-6 prosecutions. And he’s done it.

He has the power to fire 18 independent inspector generals. And he’s done it.

He has the power to deploy U.S. Army personnel and equipment to the southern border, and to issue an executive order “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Full Capacity.” And he has done it.

He has directed the Department of Education to stamp down on “radical Marxist indoctrination” in public schools.

He has directed the Justice Department to stop enforcement of consent decrees designed to reform police departments with a track record of racism and police brutality, and to limit the enforcement of the FACE Act that protects reproductive health facilities from harassment and obstruction.

His administration only just begun to severely interrupt the normal workings of key federal agencies, from the Center for Disease Control to USAID to the Treasury Department itself.

There will be chaos. There will be ineptitude. There will be a surplus of cruelty.

And there will be threats of harm, and actual harm, to scores of millions of people living in the U.S., whether they be citizens or green card holders or undocumented immigrants.

And there will be a relentless rhetorical assault on the norms, laws, and institutions that provide protection for the civil freedom and political legitimacy of all of those that Trump deems “enemies of the people.”

It is possible that effective political opposition may eventually be mounted by a reinvigorated Democratic Party—though I would not bet on it happening any time soon.

But it is inevitable that Trump will exercise the tremendous executive power in his possession to poison public discourse and destroy the foundations of responsible public policy.

Trump is a liar and an autocrat. There is no reason to trust anything he says or to support anything he does. But there is every reason to believe him when he promises to “annihilate” his opponents and to advance a xenophobic and authoritarian vision of “American Greatness.” Because he has already begun to do exactly this. And he is just getting started.