Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, far-right commentator Jack Posobiec declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it.” Closing out the gathering, former President Donald Trump followed Posobiec’s lead, echoing the lionization of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as innocent “hostages.”
If these were random remarks — or satire, as Posobiec later claimed — they could perhaps be brushed off. But they come on top of hundreds of specific promises and proposals by Trump and his allies to impose autocracy in our country. We comprehensively document this material in the new American Autocracy Threat Tracker, which will continue to be updated in real time. As attorneys and analysts who have fought autocratic initiatives by Trump or his imitators, we have concluded that if Trump returns to office there is a high risk of America’s falling into autocracy.
So far we have documented over 250 promises and plans from Trump, his staff and associated groups that threaten democracy.
So far we have documented over 250 promises and plans from Trump, his staff and associated groups that threaten democracy: from attacking the free press to praising authoritarian leaders to promising to purge federal employees. His penchant for spreading disinformation and baseless conspiracies is another red flag. So is his embrace of Christian nationalism and his condoning of antisemitism. Recently, and infamously, he even said he would be a dictator on “day one.”
Trump supporters sometimes claim his more extreme statements are jokes. But we shouldn’t be laughing. Trump has, after all, offered many examples of authoritarian rhetoric that extend into particular policy aspirations. For example, Trump told Fox News that he would be a “day one” dictator specifically “to close the border and … drill, drill, drill.” What else can his declaration of dictatorship on these issues imply but an intent to avoid the constitutional requirement that Congress makes the laws and the president executes them?
Nor has Trump been any less deliberate and detailed about his plans to place himself squarely above the law. He has hinted at using the presidency to seek revenge against the prosecutors of the cases against him. “If you go after me, I’m coming after you,” he has promised, including calling for the citizen’s arrests of New York’s attorney general and the judge involved in the civil fraud case that he just lost.
The former president has also claimed that he has the power to pardon himself and that he is entitled to full immunity from prosecution. His legal team argued to a federal appellate court that Trump could direct SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political opponent and be immune from prosecution (unless he is first impeached and convicted, which has never happened to a president in American history). The ex-president is effectively crowning himself king, saying he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Unsurprisingly, this includes using the Justice Department to persecute his political enemies, starting with President Joe Biden and his family. Trump even hinted at executing a high-ranking general who crossed him.
Arguably Trump’s scariest rhetoric, however, relates to how he continually demonizes Americans with whom he disagrees. He has called those who don’t support him “demonic forces.” Echoing fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Trump has labeled those who oppose him as “vermin” and has vowed to root them out. This is not politics as usual, harmless humor or careless hyperbole.
We ignore leaders who preach authoritarianism —and those who enable them — at our peril.
Trump’s lack of principles or moral compass is carrying over to the Republican Party as a whole. Increasingly, the party that once called for America to be “a city on a hill” at CPAC is now driving democracy into a ditch. Instead of following Ronald Reagan’s challenge to it, the GOP is embracing autocracy.
We ignore leaders who preach authoritarianism — and those who enable them — at our peril. Even before Trump won the 2016 election, scholars warned about the threat he posed to democracy. His tenure, culminating in the events of Jan. 6, proved those threats real. Since then, Trump has doubled down on his antidemocratic intentions, and too many Americans — from his enablers in the Republican Party to the mainstream media, where too many consistently put him in a normal political frame, to the voters who’ve grown tired of partisan bickering — aren’t grasping how dangerous his ideas are.
The good news is that there are many solutions to fortify American democracy against threats: from bipartisan pro-democratic coalitions and combating disinformation to narrower steps like improving voter access and enacting protections for the independence of federal agencies. Ultimately, safeguarding democracy is about winning hearts and minds: reminding Americans of our nation’s founding values, breaking through the daily noise of partisanship to alert people about the danger of Trump’s plans and advancing a renewed commitment to democracy — locally, nationally and globally.
There are two roads in front of us. One leads to our nation’s continuation as a city on a hill, the other to the deterioration of our democracy. In the next eight months, all of us need to do everything we can to make sure that Americans know that the second route is a dead end.