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In early December, Donald Trump sat down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity for a town-hall-style event in Iowa, where the candidate said he wouldn’t be a dictator if he returned to the White House — “except for Day One.” Offered an opportunity to explain himself, the former president suggested that he’d use dictatorial powers to “close the border” and approve increased oil drilling.
When the host tried to help his guest, the likely GOP nominee doubled down, but assured the audience that his envisioned dictatorship would be temporary.
Republican officials insisted that the former president was kidding. He wasn’t. In the weeks that followed, Trump repeated the line over and over again.
In the former president’s latest event for Fox, he returned to the subject, reflecting on what he said in early December:
“I said, I’m going to be a dictator for one day. We’re going to do two things: The border — we’re going to make it so tight, you can’t get in unless you come in legally — and the other is energy. We’re going to drill baby drill. After that, I’m not going to be a dictator. After that, I’m not going to be a dictator.”
This generated hearty applause from the Iowa Republicans in attendance.
He went on to say, “And the press picks it up. So I said, I’m going to be a dictator for one day. They cut it. They go, ‘I’m going to be a dictator.’ But they cut the rest of the sentence.”
Trump concluded that he's not "going to be dictator" — though he never got around to rejecting or denouncing his "day one" ambitions.
In other words, Trump is of the opinion that he was simply taken out of context — which might be more persuasive if the context helped his case, but it doesn’t.
The Republican apparently believes that the “day one” part of the equation makes his vision tolerable. Dictatorships are to be avoided, the argument goes, but 24-hour dictatorships — for policy priorities Trump deems worthwhile — are fine.
Circling back to our coverage from last month, the GOP frontrunner apparently envisions a model in which he would temporarily abandon the United States’ system of government, build a border wall that he claims to have already built, and expand oil production despite the fact that the Biden administration has already done that.
The idea that the Republican’s position is somehow acceptable because he only wants to exercise authoritarian rule for a brief period is not just utterly bonkers, it reflects an inherent hostility to the bedrock principles that serve as the foundation for the American experiment.