Trump thinks a president can kill his enemies. If he wins in 2024 there will be no one to stop him.

Donald Trump’s lawyer argued this week in court that Trump would have had the legal right, as president, to have his political rivals assassinated. He was arguing for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to declare Trump immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in office, saying that a president is allowed to break any law, including laws that prohibit murder.

It’s just one of many signs that Trump’s possible second term will be far worse than his first. He’s still angry about how he lost to President Joe Biden, he is desperate to escape prosecution for his many alleged crimes, he is publicly calling the left “vermin” that he will “root out,” he is using extreme white supremacist language by claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he now lives entirely in a bubble of fake news that makes no sense to outsiders, and his mental capacities have clearly declined in the few years he has been out of the White House.

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

Trump and his cronies aren’t hiding their plans to dismantle democracy if he wins again in 2024, but is anyone paying attention?

Just last month, Trump was asked in an interview with Sean Hannity if he would abuse power as president to get back at people, and he said that he would rule as a “dictator” on his first day in office, getting applause from the conservative audience.

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He’s not hiding his intentions. He is promising to end democracy in the U.S. – just a couple years after he gathered a mob to storm the Capitol and install him as president for another four years – and people still seem fairly blase about him likely winning the GOP primary and polling neck-and-neck against Biden. Maybe people are operating under the assumption that if America survived his first four years, then perhaps another four wouldn’t be so bad.

But that’s ignoring the fact that he’s taking off even the weak guardrails he had in place in his first term when he appointed party establishment figures to many positions in the White House; this time, he’s screening appointees with a questionnaire to make sure that they’re “listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff.”

There’s also his fairly obvious decline in cognitive abilities in the past several years – he’s been slurring words and sounding incoherent at his rallies. Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has noticed and said that Trump has “lost the zip on his fastball.”

The change was noticeable even in a 2022 speech he gave where he told rambling, fantastical stories about trans women that had no relationship to reality. It’s not just that his words were transphobic – they were, of course – but they showed that his mind wasn’t working the way it used to.

The fact that he got kicked off Twitter for inciting violence may actually help him in this regard. He had a social media platform built for him and his supporters – Truth Social – where his incoherent rants aren’t seen by most Americans. Now, only his fans regularly see that he is having trouble stringing words together in a way that has any meaning at all. His rallies, too, are for friendly audiences. He relies heavily on teleprompters, and he has avoided appearing on the GOP debate stage where he’ll be forced to speak impromptu and to a more general audience.

But what Trump is lacking in mental acuity this time around, he’s making up for in bonkers grandiosity. His latest campaign ad claims that God created him to be president and makes up an entire story – belied by reports that he spent all day watching TV when he was in the White House – of how he is hard-working. The ad also works in his resentment that there are people who disagree with him, promising to “fight the Marxists,” which includes everyone but hardline Republicans.

“And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” a narrator says in a recent campaign ad. “God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”

“GOD MADE TRUMP” pic.twitter.com/l03fK9SSfC

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) January 5, 2024

Perhaps some people still think that authoritarianism is something that can’t happen in America. It happens in other countries, but not here.

But if Trump gets a second term, there is nothing holding him back. The Supreme Court has already been stacked with far-right ideologues, three of whom he appointed himself.

Congress can’t be trusted to exercise any oversight; loyalty to Trump is the only thing that unites Congressional Republicans. Moreover, they can hold hearings, but he’s not going to care about those. Anything short of impeachment and removal – which will require a lot of Republican support – won’t stop him.

And the executive branch will be the worst of all. Republicans have spent the last several years demonizing the FBI and the Justice Department (DOJ) for prosecuting the January 6 insurrectionists and Trump himself. He’s getting ready to appoint more radical lawyers to the DOJ who will give him more personal control over federal law enforcement and allow him to do as he pleases, as he was frustrated in 2020 when the DOJ and White House lawyers generally rejected his attempts to overturn the election.

So when Trump acts on the fact that he believes the president has a legal right to kill U.S. citizens who oppose his agenda, who is going to stop him?

“I am terrified about what could possibly happen,” Michelle Obama said in an interview this week, referring to the 2024 election. “We cannot take this democracy for granted. And sometimes I worry that we do.”

She’s right; too many people take it for granted that, no matter who wins the election, things will largely be the same for everyday people, that the government doesn’t affect people much or won’t change all that much. LGBTQ+ people tend to be more politically active, but far too many are still complacent about this election.

The only silver lining here is that Trump isn’t keeping any of this a secret, and there are still months until the general election to work against his reelection.