A few days ago, Robert Kagan, editor at large at The Washington Post, wrote an article titled: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” In this article, the main claims of which are discussed below, Kagan warns that the US is sleepwalking into a dictatorship, which would become effective once Trump is elected for the second time, in November 2024. To avoid this outcome, a number of decisive political actions should be taken now, by both the Democrats and the Republicans, who are currently pretending or hoping that this eventuality will not materialise.
Robert Kagan is not some neo-Bolshevik who despises Trump a-priori for ideological reasons. Robert Kagan is a neo-conservative Republican, in favour of military interventionism and nation-building, and co-founder of the think tank “Project for the New American Century.” He served in the George W. Bush administration, with foreign policy hawks such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. During the 2008 presidential campaign he served as foreign policy advisor to John McCain, the Republican Party’s nominee. In the same year, Kagan wrote an article titled “Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776” for World Affairs Journal, describing the main components of American neoconservatism “as a belief in the rectitude of applying US moralism to the world stage.”
So, Kagan is a 24-carat conservative Republican, who in 2016 left the party due to its nomination of Donald Trump. He must have thought that populist Trump represented a deviation from the traditional mandate of the Republican party, that of defending US moralism and inspiring liberal democracies with a conservative tendency around the globe. Now that he sees Trump potentially winning again, he is warning that it could lead the US to become a dictatorship.
Kagan believes that Trump will use the trials against him to prove that he is superior to the judiciary, which has already been bent in his favour with his appointment of three of the nine Supreme Court judges. He will then use the power of the executive branch to organize an extensive spoils system and replace the top- and medium-level bureaucrats of the much-hated “deep state” with his own loyalists. His Republican party will likely control the two branches of Congress, and he will effectively keep them hostage, vetoing any law that he does not like. He may run again, for a third term, ignoring the 22ndamendment of the US Constitution. If Trump loses, as in 2020, he will stage a coup, finishing the job left incomplete on January 6th, 2020, when Trump endorsed the sedition and the assault to Capitol Hill by his supporters, on the day Congress was meeting to ratify the election of Joe Biden as President of the US.
How likely is this to happen? Well, as we discussed in a previous column, Trump is now by far the leading candidate to win the nomination for the Republican party for the November 2024 presidential election. He has a 47-point lead versus the runner-up, Ron DeSantis, and a 27-point lead versus all the other candidates, combined. He is ahead of Biden in almost all polls conducted at national level, and ahead in key swing states. So, Trump may well win in 2024, and the trials against him are unlikely to prevent that from happening. Actually, he will probably use them as a platform to run his technically revolutionary campaign, and to show that he is above the judiciary, which will not be able to contain him.
We have repeatedly discussed how the number of liberal democracies is diminishing in favour of electoral democracies and authoritarian regimes. The US may be on the verge of embarking on such a journey.
