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At a White House event last week, Donald Trump asked Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, how long he’s been in power. Aliyev, who’s long been repeatedly accused by international observers of being a dictator, replied, “It’s been 22 years.”
The American president, clearly impressed, said, “Twenty-two years, that’s pretty good.” At that point, Trump turned to attendees and added, “That means he’s tough and smart.”
It was a timely reminder: The Republican doesn’t admire dictators despite their despotism, he admires them because of their despotism.
For those concerned about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, it’s obviously been a rough year, but it’s also been an especially rough week. In recent days, the American president has militarized the nation’s capital, voiced interest in circumventing Congress (again), and exerted control over private businesses, museums and cultural institutions.
At his latest press conference, the Republican addressed the underlying issue, responding to “dictatorial” accusations while commenting on his decision to deploy National Guard troops to D.C. streets and place local police officers under federal control. NBC News reported:
Trump criticized his political opponents for slamming his decisions to deploy the National Guard to D.C. and take over the D.C. police. ‘Already they’re saying, ‘He’s a dictator.’ [Washington, D.C.] is going to hell, and we’ve got to stop it,’ Trump said of the capital. ‘So instead of saying ‘He’s a dictator,’ they should say, ‘We’re going to join him and make Washington safe,’ drawing applause from some people in the room.
He delivered the comments as if he were baffled as to why anyone would criticize him for pursuing such an inherently noble and worthwhile goal.
What amazed me about the unscripted and unprompted comment was that he didn’t say the accusations were wrong, per se, but only that the accusations were irrelevant.
Instead of insisting that his critics have been unnecessarily alarmist, Trump suggested his critics have missed the point: The president feels the need to improve conditions in D.C. How he chooses to pursue such a goal is far less important than the goal itself.
Indeed, he wasn’t especially subtle about any of this: Trump believes the nation’s capital is “going to hell”; he believes he and his team have “got to stop it”; and so it doesn’t much matter whether he’s acting like a dictator or not.
Soon after, White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters, “President Trump doesn’t have a limitation on his authority to make this country safe again. There’s no limitation on that.”
Of course, in this country, presidential powers are limited — by laws, court rulings and co-equal branches of government, but to hear Homan tell it, none of those considerations are especially important.
Ahead of Election Day 2024, Trump talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions and creating a temporary American “dictatorship.” Months later, the relevance of that rhetoric lingers for increasingly obvious reasons.