For Donald Trump’s would-be running mates, time is running out. The former president has said he intends to announce his decision around the time of the Republican National Convention, which is less than a month away, signaling to the GOP contenders that it’s time to make their final moves in the race to the bottom.
It was against this backdrop that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on Wednesday pitched the idea that the United States is currently a “dictatorship.” As Mediate summarized:
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who is on Donald Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, said the United States under President Joe Biden is a “dictatorship.” Burgum joined Wednesday’s installment of The Story on Fox News, where host Martha MacCallum played a montage of political pundits fretting over a potential dictatorship if the former president returns to the White House.
Burgum, an apparent finalist for his party’s vice presidential nomination, called the speculation “ridiculous,” before shifting to his broader point.
“Under Joe Biden, we’re actually living under a dictatorship today where he’s, you know, bypassing Congress on immigration policy; he’s bypassing Congress on protecting our border; he’s bypassing Congress on student loan forgiveness; he’s defying the Supreme Court.
“I mean, those are the things that authoritarians and dictators do: They don’t follow our democratic processes and they just assert their own liberal view,” the Republican governor concluded. “And that’s what the Biden administration is doing.”
I won’t pretend to know whether Burgum actually believes what he said, or whether this was the best he could do in the hopes of scoring points with Mar-a-Lago. Either way, however, if the North Dakotan expects people to believe the United States is currently a “dictatorship,” he’s going to have to do better than this.
While it’s certainly true that Biden has used his executive authority on a variety of policy fronts, it’s also true that every American president has used executive authority on a variety of policy fronts. That is not, in and of itself, evidence of authoritarianism.
Indeed, Trump himself bypassed Congress on immigration and border policy, and as best as I can tell, Burgum didn’t complain about those efforts — at the time or since.
But stepping back, there’s a larger context to this. The presumptive GOP nominee — the one Burgum is so eager to please — has an unnerving habit of celebrating foreign dictators. He’s called for private sector executives to be fired unless they support his 2024 candidacy. He’s spent recent months echoing Hitler while lashing out at immigrants, complaining that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country” and describing migrants as “vermin.”
Trump is also the candidate who continues to raise the prospect of building new detention camps, creating a temporary “dictatorship,” cracking down on the free press and seizing control of the federal appropriations process.
It’s against this backdrop that Burgum wants Fox News viewers to believe that Biden is seizing dictatorial control, which is (a) demonstrably absurd; and (b) rather ironic, given the circumstances.