The Dirty Secret

Jim Read for the Avon Hills Salon

In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, he has concentrated power in the executive branch, and in himself as president, to a degree without counterpart in American history, at least in peacetime, and arguably not even in wartime. The 100 Days meme dates to the early months of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, when both the American and the world economies appeared on the brink of collapse. Roosevelt responded by successfully urging Congress to pass an enormous number of bills in a short span of time, establishing a long list of new programs and agencies designed to address the economic crisis.

Trump’s shock-and-awe actions since his inauguration on January 20, in their velocity and range, bear a superficial similarity to FDR’s actions in the early months of his first term. But the differences are more striking than the similarities. On the date of his inauguration, FDR was responding to a deep economic crisis of nearly four years’ duration. No comparable economic crisis preceded Trump’s actions, though those actions may very well generate an economic crisis.

FDR persuaded Congress to enact his New Deal programs. Nearly every one of Trump’s actions, many of them enormously consequential for the United States and the world, have been declared by executive fiat, without any action by Congress, a body that Trump has effectively treated as irrelevant. Several of FDR’s New Deal actions and programs were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, leading Roosevelt to propose his ill-advised “court packing” scheme, which Congress refused to enact. Trump’s response to court rulings striking down his actions is simpler and more brutal: he simply ignores the court decision – even when issued by the U.S. Supreme Court – and doubles down on whatever the court directed him to stop doing. This is exemplified by his continued refusal to respect constitutional guarantees of due process in his summary apprehension, deportation, and incarceration without prospect of remedy for individuals who have not been convicted or charged with any crime.

Some conservative writers have raised an alarm about Trump’s actions, arguing that Trump’s centralization of power creates great risks for conservative values and principles the next time a Democratic president is elected. For if Trump sets the precedent of sweeping presidential powers without restraint by either Congress or the judiciary, what is to stop a Democratic president from using those same sweeping powers to enact an agenda radically opposed to what American conservatives support?

If we were living in ordinary political times, this might be a relevant argument. But we are not living in ordinary political times. Trump, and his advisors, and probably a significant proportion of his strong supporters among the electorate, have no intention of ever again permitting a Democrat to take office as president, and they are prepared to employ whatever means, legal or illegal, are necessary to this end. That is the dirty secret behind Trump’s unprecedented assertion of presidential power.

In saying this, I do not mean that Trump and his advisors believe Trump’s policies will be so massively popular among Americans that a Democratic presidential candidate won’t have anything to run on in 2028. The opposite is the case: the American public, faced with the reality of Trump’s actions, is rapidly souring on them. Trump and his advisors know this.

I mean that Trump will do everything in his power to prevent free elections, or if he cannot prevent them, to forcibly negate their results, as he attempted to do on January 6, 2021. He is prepared to take similar actions again, if necessary, to keep himself and his allies in power. He has no intention of respecting the 22^nd amendment of the U.S. Constitution limiting presidents to two terms, any more than he feels obligated to respect the constitution’s guarantee of due process of law.

I do not believe Trump is powerful enough literally to cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections, though I have no doubt that he would if he could. It is important to recall that during his first term, as early as July 2020, Trump called for “postponing’ the 2020 presidential election. After he lost the election, he demanded that state election officials arbitrarily alter election counts, and he seriously considered declaring martial law and directing the U.S. military to “re-run” the 2020 presidential election under his supervision. The latter proposal went nowhere because high ranking military officers clearly and publicly declared their refusal to participate in an unconstitutional act of this kind. Now, in his second term, Trump has purged most of those “disloyal” officers.

In the United States it is the states that conduct elections, and Trump will be unable to cancel them. But he, and his allies within states, are already contemplating measures that could seriously compromise the fairness and impartiality of elections. These include continued, increasingly authoritarian efforts at voter suppression, and refusal by Republican-dominated states and counties to certify fair election results that do not go Trump’s way. I would not rule out his deploying armed ICE agents to show up at polling places, intimidating U.S. citizens of immigrant descent (or who have immigrant-sounding names) with the prospect of Trump’s trademark kidnapping, deportation, and incarceration, without any opportunity to challenge the legality of the act.

With respect to the Democrats retaking the U.S. House in 2026, Trump might regard this as a minor setback, because Congress, he believes, can be simply ignored. The presidency is the ring of power that must be held at all costs.

Whether Trump will succeed in making himself dictator for life, and handpicking which successor will inherit his unchecked power, is an open question. There remain resources for democratic opposition in our political traditions, in the states, and in the population at large, millions of whom have demonstrated that they are less afraid of Trump than are many corporate leaders and university presidents.

For this reason, I make no predictions about the ultimate success of Trump’s efforts to overturn, not only the U.S. Constitution, but the entire American political tradition of sanctifying elections and rejecting kings. Trump may fail by showing his hand too quickly and overplaying it. But it is essential that we have no illusions about his intentions -- about his “design,” to quote the Declaration of Independence, and the ultimate destination toward which his “long train of abuses and usurpations” is headed.