Donald Trump admits that he wants to be dictator & no one seems to care

With the election less than one year away, one thing is clear. Donald Trump doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be dictator.

Trump has shed any semblance of respect for democratic norms (not that he ever had much). Now, he and his most fervent supporters are outright promising that his second term would more closely resemble that of the strong men that Trump swooned over when he was president.

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If that sounds like an overstatement, it’s not. Trump himself admits it.

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In a friendly interview last week with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Hannity tossed Trump a softball question. (Well, they all were.) He asked the former president to vouch that he had no “plans whatsoever if reelected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people.”

Trump’s answer: “You mean, like they’re using right now?” He then went on to complain about his indictments and to praise Al Capone as “one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals.”

So Hannity tried again: “Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight — you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

“Except for Day One,” Trump answered. Someone in the audience yelled, “Yeah!” Trump said he wanted to close the borders and “drill, drill, drill.”

Trump has never demonstrated anything like self-restraint when it comes to power, so there’s zero reason to believe he would stop at one day. In fact, he and his lackeys are planning for a long-term dismantling of democracy.

Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s National Security Council, gave an interview last week where he promised to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Just to make it clear that he was talking about legal action, Patel said, “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure it out.”

Using the Justice Department to punish political foes is a top priority of Trump. He has privately said he wants to prosecute former staffers who have turned on him. He has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to go after President Joe Biden and his family. To do so, he would have to break established norms and have the Justice Department report directly to him instead of maintaining a neutral role.

Trump supporters are gleefully informing the press about their efforts to screen potential political appointees with a questionnaire that makes sure, in the words of one Trump supporter, you’re “listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff.” Those appointees are necessary because Trump plans on firing thousands of civil servants to replace them with loyalists.  

If you don’t like any of this and decide to protest, Trump has a response for that, too. He plans on invoking the Insurrection Act and bringing out the military to squash – with weapons if need be – any public protest.

For LGBTQ+ rights, that would mean Trump could reinstate the ban on trans military personnel from his first term. Sure, there will be court challenges, but Trump doesn’t much care about the law. He may not bother waiting for the courts to figure it out. Besides, he stacked the Supreme Court in his favor.

That’s just one of a list of anti-trans policies that Trump plans on instituting. Under normal circumstances, some would never be implemented because they require Congressional approval, like preventing care for trans youth. But what’s to stop Trump from simply issuing a directive doing so by fiat?

Over the past several weeks, the mainstream media has regularly been pointing out that Trump’s second term would be a disaster for democracy. The Atlantic ran a special issue with 24 articles outlining how damaging Trump’s re-election would be on everything from the military to science. Even The New York Times has, in its voice-of-God way, characterized the potential second Trump administration as stacked to enable Trump’s “authoritarian tendencies.”

But somehow that doesn’t seem real to most Americans. They think we’re just headed into another election, with Trump saying the usual crazy stuff he says. His inability to do a fraction of the stuff he promised the first time around has led people to think he’s more bluster than execution.

However, this time Trump has gotten rid of the adults in the room who constrained him in his first term. He only wants people who will say yes to his every whim and make sure it’s carried out by people who agree with those whims. And, as with all things Trump, the main whim is to make it all about him, with all his bad impulses run loose.

After all, this is the man who once said, “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.” What would you expect of him if he could do anything he wanted?