Trump advocates will vigorously deny any accusations brought against him to the effect that he said or did something that is not merely in violation of some institutional or established norm but is in fact in violation of our laws or our Constitution. So, for instance, in response to the claim that Trump considered seizing states’ voting machines and ballots following his loss in the 2020 General Election – which, incidentally, is massively illegal, and wholly beyond the scope of the authority of the Federal Government, since states run their own elections – Trump advocates will say that he never would have actually gone through with it, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t in fact go through with it, and thus that we’re really getting hysterical over nothing. But it’s not nothing. There are immediately at least three problems here, all devastating.
The first problem is that the fact that this was even discussed as an option would seem to indicate that Trump was not aware that this could not even possibly be justified within the law. This is a common theme of Trump’s presidency: namely, that he seems to have very little idea as to how our system of governance actually works. This is not him bringing a refreshing outsider’s perspective to challenge an overly rigid set of otherwise arbitrary conventional assumptions, but is rather simple ignorance as to the limits of executive power. Secondly, the fact that it was considered seriously also indicates Trump’s general indifference to those limits. And thirdly, given that this ought to have been entirely out of the question, it further indicates the extent to which Trump is not merely indifferent to the limits of executive power, but recognizes no check on that power as being inherently legitimate, as opposed to merely practically effective or ineffective. Apparently the only reason Trump did not go through with this plan was that his staff and officials at the Department of Justice would not agree to participate in it.
I used to find Trump advocates’ dismissals of the seriousness of such instances infuriating. I thought that if I could only get through to them, since they clearly still seemed to be committed at least to the Constitutional principles I was articulating, they could not ultimately help but conclude – as I did – that Trump had run afoul of the bedrock values of our collective political enterprise. This was when I still thought that I could get through to them. But it was also when I thought that they did in fact actually share these values and were merely so invested in Trump that they resisted being brought to see that he did not share them with us. I am now convinced that they are not in fact committed to these values at all, and thus that appealing to them on this basis is an entirely lost cause, even if we could get through to them. When they claim, or seem to claim, that they are in fact still committed to such basic values as are embodied in our Constitution, they are either simply being disingenuous, or are self-deceived. Considering that they will defend Trump no matter how apparently egregious his transgressions, I could not see why they would not simply admit to having abandoned our shared values. But they refuse to admit this for the same reason they refuse to admit that Trump does not share these values: they want to think of themselves, and of him, as not only good Americans, but as the real Americans.
Implausible Deniability
There was a time when there was a certain degree of plausibility in bemused disavowals of Trump’s autocratic instincts and inclinations – when these still had to be inferred from his various cryptic remarks about dictators and dictatorial regimes elsewhere in the world, and from actions he undertook as President, such as deploying paramilitary troops in Portland, Oregon to round up protestors without warrants or charges. But that time has now long since passed. This April, Trump’s legal team argued before the Supreme Court that Presidents are Constitutionally privileged to enjoy absolute immunity from all criminal prosecution both while in office and afterward, for any and all acts undertaken in furtherance of the official duties of the President. Aside from being preposterous on its very face, this would quite clearly place the President squarely above both the law and the Constitution, which it can only be said is something that the Founders could not possibly have intended, since they had just gotten done with a war that was fought to – among other things – liberate the Colonies from the authority of a ruler who was formally held to be above the law. As Jon Stewart puts it, “That is monarchy shit.” If in fact an argument could plausibly be made to the effect that the Constitution supports Trump’s legal contention here, then we should probably concede that the Constitution is not the brilliantly written politico-legal document we take it to be.
Moreover, far from there being any sort of consensus to the effect that Presidents are or ought to be immune from criminal prosecution, there is in fact clear precedent affirming just the opposite. Though Nixon was not prosecuted for the crimes he (pretty certainly) committed during the Watergate affair, in the weeks immediately following Nixon’s resignation there were repeated calls for his prosecution. And Mitch McConnell argued against convicting Trump on his second impeachment in Congress, for inciting the January 6th insurrection, on the grounds that Trump could be criminally prosecuted once he left office. It just cannot be seriously maintained that our system recognizes, or was designed or intended to recognize, any such absolute Presidential immunity.
Of course it could reasonably be said that Trump’s legal argument here is not really meant to be taken seriously, since the obvious objective of his case for immunity is simply to delay the prosecutions pending against him until after the election, in the hopes that he will be re-elected and thus in a position to direct the Department of Justice to dismiss these cases.[1] I have argued elsewhere that Trump’s entire approach to life in general is wholly cynical, so his immunity argument not being meant to be taken seriously would certainly fit this pattern. But I don’t think that his immunity argument is merely frivolous either. Because it does not directly violate the language of the Constitution, it cannot simply be directly dismissed as patently unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court were willing to grant any part of Trump’s argument, that would clearly benefit him; and even if he merely succeeds in delaying his prosecutions, this could also potentially benefit him. So it’s a win for him either way. But the larger point is that Trump’s immunity argument is cynical in a deeper, more damaging, and much darker sense: namely, it denies the political and legal legitimacy of any limits on executive power.
Indeed, Trump has repeatedly invoked Article II of the Constitution to support his contention that he has “the right to do whatever [he wants] as President.” Of course Article II says and implies nothing of the sort, but the point is that Trump thinks (or claims to think) both that as Chief Executive he ought to have this sort of power, and that the Constitution guarantees it. What Trump appears not to understand is that the President is not CEO of America, Incorporated.[2] The government simply is not a business, and the single most significant reason why it ought not be treated as one is that, in a system of self-governance, we cannot have a hierarchical power structure topped by an executive who is unaccountable to the very people who he was elected to serve. The Presidency is a public trust, not a private position of individual privilege and authority. Even the Unitary Executive Theory of Presidential power does not hold that the President is wholly unaccountable to the law and the Constitution, but the authors of Project 2025 – which is the Republican plan for remaking the Federal Government in their image – have come as close to rendering the President unaccountable as seems possible within the letter of the law.
Right-wing and alt-right media outlets, pundits, and commentators are not even any longer trying to disguise their abandonment of established Constitutional principles. Michael Knowles has more than once called for an end to term limits for Presidents – not as a matter of general political conviction, mind you, but specifically and only to allow Donald Trump to rule indefinitely.[3] The last, and only, President to serve more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt, who won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote by solid majorities in each of the four General Elections held between 1932 and 1944. The 22nd Amendment, which imposed a two-term limit on the office of President, was approved by Congress in 1947, and finally ratified by 36 out of the (then) 48 states in 1951. The Amendment was, in fact, proposed precisely in response to Roosevelt’s four terms, despite his enduring popularity, if for no other reason than to prevent one political faction or individual from dominating American governance. Trump lost the popular vote both in 2016 and in 2020, and his approval rating never rose above 50% the entire time he served as President. When he left office, his approval rating was a resoundingly dismal 34%. The idea of a Mandate to govern seems no longer to even be a part of American political discourse, but it was once thought to matter that and whether an incoming President at least won the popular vote, and won it by a significant margin, indicating that he would not be governing a large minority or even a majority of Americans grudgingly, but would govern under the approval of most of us. And here Knowles wants to make Trump President for Life, not only in clear defiance of any hint of a Mandate, but against the clear will of a majority of Americans. That is just not how democracy works.[4]
So, how comes it that Trump advocates have in fact abandoned the bedrock values of our system of self-governance and yet continue to talk as though they have not? The answer comes in three parts. There’s their hatred of the left, the death of their culture and their identification of this culture with America as such, and a dark calculus of power.
The Right’s Hatred of the Left and the Death of Conservative Culture
I have touched on this before, but it really cannot be overstated or underestimated the extent to which American conservatives really and truly hate American liberals. And I mean hate them. With a passion. This is for a variety of reasons, but not the least of these is that they feel that liberals are responsible for the dying out of their ideal version of America, starting with Political Correctness. I am just going to come right out and admit right up front that Political Correctness is and always was a terrible idea and could not possibly have helped but do anything other than generate precisely the sort of resentment that it has created among conservatives. What we are witnessing is, in a sense, a society-wide release of a very long-bottled-up, collective invitation to Go Royally Fuck Ourselves. In a lot of ways it is best not to think of Donald Trump as a specific individual but as more of a symbol, network of symbols, or symbolic framework. Trump advocates want him to win – not merely the Presidency, but in general – not so much in order to achieve any specific policy aims or goals, but to reclaim their America, to stick it to the liberal elites who have ruined their lives and their country, and to make it as absolutely clear to us as they possibly can that they would rather elect an avatar of their hatred than someone who might actually get anything done – like repealing and replacing Obamacare, or completing the border wall, or actually banning Muslims, or actually fighting corruption or draining the swamp, or what have you. Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to policy and accomplishments, they will claim that Trump is admirable on both counts. But aside from the question of the plausibility of that view, the truth is that even if they are right, this is just so much icing on the “Fuck You” cake, which is the real point of a Trump Presidency.
During an argument over Trump’s recently completed trial in New York, in which he had been charged with falsifying business records, one Trump advocate asked me if I was “really okay with all this wokeness.” Of course I pointed out that we were not talking about “wokeness” but about the legal basis for the prosecution’s case against Trump. But as far as she was concerned we were indeed talking about “wokeness”, with the trial being merely one instantiation of this phenomenon – one example of it. This is always the real issue, lying just beneath the surface. Tim Miller, in his Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell, notes that even amongst his fellow Republican campaign strategists, “underneath the [political] performance there was a much more deep-seated desire to see the other side punished. To watch them get owned.” He says,
- Their grievances were based in part on ideology, but more often it seemed like simple interpersonal annoyance and privilege. They live in liberal bubbles and find their neighbors’ excesses grating. They are sick of being told what they should and shouldn’t say or do. They are embittered that the media is always being unfair to them. They are tired of diversity requirements that mean they lose out on jobs to “people of color.” They blanche at the DEI packets being handed out at their kids’ schools. They find the left-wing sanctimony in the prestige-TV shows they watch grating as fuck. … All of that annoyance and envy bottles up until it boils over. … This rage would come out of nowhere from otherwise gentle people. … They wanted to cut the left down a peg. Put a cap on the diversifying cultural elite who were flourishing at what they perceived was their expense. Trump was the vehicle for doing it.
It’s tempting to ask why these folks – most especially Republican political operatives, who are well-paid and presumably have options when it comes to real estate – would choose to live in “liberal bubbles;” but the answer is really very simple: the right is dying, and they know it. Where else are they gonna live?
As I have pointed out before, only 25% of Americans identify as Republican. Nearly half of all Americans identify as Independent. Of course, about half of those identify as conservative to one extent or another, and many of them voted for Donald Trump. But it’s worth remembering – as I noted above – that Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, and that his approval rating as President never rose above 50%. And though he is currently polling ahead of Biden, neither of them has the support of more than 49% of all voters. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters (and in some cases even more) of all Americans are liberal on both bread-and-butter economic issues and on social issues, such as reproductive rights, rights for gay and transgender Americans, universal health care, an increase in the minimum wage, paid family leave for both mothers and fathers, and so on.
To make matters worse, polls indicated that Nikki Haley would have performed better against Biden in a General Election match-up than Trump would. This infuriates Trump supporters, and they argue that this is only when Robert Kennedy, Jr. is included as a third-party candidate, which gives Haley an artificially larger lead because Kennedy clearly siphons votes from Biden. But this is wrong twice over. The preponderance of independent polls have by now consistently indicated that Kennedy would, if anything, siphon votes from Trump, not Biden. And Haley’s margin was too large to account for the difference between her lead and Trump’s lead merely by discounting Kennedy’s share. What all of this means is that Republican presidential candidates could still win elections even if literally zero Trump supporters voted for them. This means that Trump supporters are electorally irrelevant.
Why They Did It
Imagine discovering that your cohort of voters is electorally irrelevant. There goes your leverage in a democracy. So, what then? Well, rhetorically speaking, the first thing you do is deny that America is a democracy, to legitimize your practical rejection of it. I’ve addressed this ridiculous argument elsewhere. (See my “A Note on Democracy”.) But practically speaking what you do is you begin to behave anti-democratically. And, if need be, you begin to act unconstitutionally. As David Frum puts it, in his Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” I don’t know whether this is foreordained. It seems plausible to think that a cultural group within America could lose its grip on power without ultimately attempting to take America itself down with it. But this group is in fact the heirs of the original American elitist tradition handed down from nativist white Protestants, and they unsurprisingly feel entitled to call the country their own, and so it does seem somewhat inevitable both that they would not go down without a fight and that their attitude would be that if they can’t have the country then no one can have it. This is cultural death without dignity.
Of course if you tell them that Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy, or to America itself, they will firstly deny it, and perhaps insist that we are not a democracy anyway but a Constitutional Republic, and then they will argue that Joe Biden is a much bigger threat, or is the only real threat to our nation. On the face of it, this seems not only preposterous but downright obstinately nonsensical. And it’s extremely difficult not to immediately reactively regard this as a knee-jerk reversal along the lines of a seven-year-old’s retort: “I know you are, but what am I?” But they do genuinely mean this. How can this be?
Firstly, in a lot of ways it’s best not to think of Joe Biden as a specific individual, but as a symbol, or a network of symbols, or a symbolic framework. This is how Trump supporters can say with a perfectly straight face that Trump is the Best President in American History, and that Biden is the Worst President in American History. From any objective standpoint both of these claims are absolutely ridiculous. But Trump supporters view Trump in the present moment in more or less the way the rest of us view Lincoln or Washington as heroes of the past. And Biden, as Trump’s foil, is thus the Benedict Arnold or the Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or what-have-you of our times. He is evil incarnate, and Trump is the very embodiment of good.
So, secondly, when we say that Trump is authoritarian and fascist, and they respond by saying that it is really Biden who embodies these characteristics, they don’t mean these things literally. Now I just got done saying that they genuinely think that Biden is the real threat to the nation, and I maintain that indeed they do think this. But when they use the terms “authoritarian” and “fascist” they do not use them with their literal meanings. Or, well, they believe that Biden does behave in ways that are authoritarian – because, for instance, they believe that he is behind the selective prosecutions of Trump, and that in maneuvering around the Supreme Court’s decision on student debt relief he is overstepping his authority as President. Never mind the points discussed above concerning the apparently boundless authority afforded the President in their view, so long as that President is named Donald Trump. They regard Biden as an outright tyrant. They will say that he is guilty of treason and ought to receive the classic punishment dealt to those who betray their country: namely, death.
But when Trump supporters use the word “fascist”, they do not mean it literally, and not merely because actual fascism is primarily a phenomenon of right-wing politics, not left-wing politics. They mean it in its metaphorical sense, which essentially reduces back to something along the lines of tyrannical or authoritarian. I should like to note here that when we use the word “fascist”, we mean it literally. And let me just pause here to be very clear about what this means. Fascism is a genuine political ideology, and it has been most succinctly defined by political theorist Roger Griffin as palingenetic ultranationalism – which is to say, a variety of extreme commitment to the primacy of national identity rooted in a myth or ethos of the cultural rebirth of its authentic “chosen” citizens. Typically a checklist of characteristics of fascist societies or states or movements would be brought forward and comparisons be made item-by-item, but I neither intend to do this nor do I find it to be necessary. The spirit embodied in the slogans “America First” – which, incidentally, has its roots in the American Nazi movement of the early Twentieth Century – and the current instantiation of “Make America Great Again” are more than sufficient to illustrate the point that Trumpism is a fascist movement. There has been a good deal of discussion of the question whether Trump is a genuine fascist, but at the end of the day I find all such discussions deeply irrelevant. Trump definitely does fascism, both as style and as theater, but also as strategy, and that is really all that truly matters.
Now, to return to the point about Trump supporters, and their view of Biden and of America, they will say that Biden has absolutely and completely destroyed the country in four years. It has been frequently pointed out that they portray Biden as both a doddering vegetable, controlled by “handlers”, and at the same time as an evil mastermind plotting and scheming his fascist takeover of America. (Though I just got done saying that I wouldn’t do this, I can’t resist in this connection observing that this perfectly fits one of Umberto Eco’s Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism: that the enemy is both too strong, and thus must be met with overbearing force, and too weak, and thus a pathetic buffoon who will be easily defeated by the just and the righteous.) Again, it’s best not to think of Biden as a specific individual, but as a symbol, or a network of symbols. And what he represents is, in their view, every single thing that they absolutely detest about the left and liberal America, plus a whole assortment of things they associate with the left but which are little more than outrageously malicious slanders, including pedophilia, child sex trafficking, and pedo-cannibalism. This last point will give you a pretty good idea of the extent to which they take the left to embody the most horrific deformities and depravities of which the human spirit is capable. They literally regard us as monsters – not the same sorts of beings as themselves. They find us literally incomprehensible. This is why they will call the pro-choice position on abortion “pro-death” and mean this literally.
In their version of America, no one has to respect anyone else’s pronouns. No one has to go along with someone else’s gender identification. No one has to allow drag queens to read books to their children in school, even if the school board and a majority of parents would approve it. No one has to be told that our institutions are organized in such a way as to systematically distribute privilege to those who have historically most benefitted from it. In short, no sort of deviation from what they consider to be bio-typical American Standard Issue should have to be recognized as disadvantaged to any degree beyond which they feel themselves to be also disadvantaged by life itself. They deeply resent the very idea that they enjoy any kind of special privilege or advantage, and they even more deeply resent the kinds of demographic shifts in American society and culture that have followed from the liberal-minded attempt to address these inequities. And to be fair, it’s not like their lives are a cake walk. This is part of the reason why they find government corruption by corporate interests most especially infuriating. And they see Joe Biden as the perfect embodiment of both sides of this two-headed, two-faced, liberal-weighted coin. And so they have made the calculation that if they cannot win democratically, they will have to win undemocratically, and even unconstitutionally, if necessary. Since their victory is in service of both the greater good, and the real America that reflects their values, and constitutes the true democracy, purified of inauthentic elements such as non-native citizens and the descendants of non-native citizens,[5] anything required to achieve this aim is justified, including the selective endorsement of an autocracy fashioned in their image.
Holding the Line
This is how Trump advocates can implicitly endorse authoritarianism and overtly claim to be loyal Americans. Of course the simple fact of the matter is that these two things are deeply incompatible. We find ourselves in the middle of a symbolic battle over the very soul of our nation, and our national identity, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly 160 years. This battle involves avatars of our competing visions of the Nation, having the stature of warring gods, and embodying our aspirations for the shape of our future as a people. This is why this moment feels so overly fraught with portent and divine meaning. This sort of conflict seems to be our fate as Americans, given the fragility of a pluralistic democratic union. Its resilience does not lie in its institutions after all, but in the commitment of ordinary Americans to ideals greater than their individual selves and the lives and fates of their representatives. This is the difference between monarchy or autocracy and true democracy: each of us stands between light and darkness, and in our equality we are both collectively and individually the last best line of defense against tyranny. Any ordinary American can prevent the ship of state from sinking, and none of us knows in advance which ordinary Americans they will be. But since it could be any of us, we must ever be ready to stand against those who would elevate any one man above the principles that bind us and define us as a free people, now and in all time to come.
[1] It has frequently been noted that Trump cannot have the case pending against him in Georgia dismissed by the Department of Justice; but while this is true, it overlooks several things. Firstly, there is the fact that it is standardly accepted that sitting Presidents cannot be prosecuted. Generally, this is taken to mean that prosecutions cannot be brought against the President while they are in office, whereas the Georgia case has already been brought. But the Justice Department’s position on the matter is that “The indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions,” and I can see no reason why they would not block Georgia’s prosecution on these grounds. Moreover, the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution stipulates that Federal Law supersedes state laws, and so that would pretty well seem to be the end of that.
[2] Trump has also said that “When somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.” He is, of course, presumably accustomed to thinking in such business-administrative terms. But beyond that, if I’m right about him being a cynic, my guess is that he just doesn’t believe in the notion of public service, and doesn’t care about it.
[3] Indeed, the totalizing completeness of the Republican commitment to Donald Trump over and above any and all principles or even policy proposals or goals is revealed quite neatly and clearly in the fact that in 2020 the Republican Party did not even bother to put forward a new platform at their National Convention.
[4] There is also the question whether Trump will in fact actually ever leave office, regardless of whether there is any attempt or effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment, or otherwise alter the Constitution or introduce some exception to the two-term limit. Pundits like Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly argue that Trump could not simply refuse to leave office or remain President beyond the two-term limit because the Constitution would not allow it, and the guardrails of our system of governance held in 2020 when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power to the Biden administration. I find both of these arguments naïve and fatuous in the extreme. Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election (see my discussion of the Fraudulent Electors Plot in my “The Case Against Trump”), and his subsequent call for the suspension of portions of the Constitution, demonstrate beyond any possible doubt his utter indifference to the constraints imposed by the Constitution. And the fact that the guardrails held last time does not mean that they will hold this time. As has frequently been pointed out, Trump was largely prevented from succeeding last time by the refusal of members of his Cabinet and officials at the Department of Justice to cooperate. Trump will have learned his lesson from this and will ensure that everyone in the DOJ and in his Cabinet are loyalists who will cooperate regardless of what he asks them to do. And in any event, think of it this way: if you try but fail to embezzle millions of dollars from your employer, and the Board of Directors fires you, should the boss re-hire you to the same position since you didn’t succeed in stealing from him the first time?
[5] In case you’ve been wondering when I would get around to it, this is where the Great Replacement Theory comes in.
Foul Play 
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