Hey Americans! We're Living in a Dictatorship.
Just in case there was any doubt....
Donald Trump does possess a certain kind of political genius. Few people thought he could pull off implementing a full-blown dictatorship, because few believed that a president of the United States would use that position to destroy the very government he was elected to lead.
Remember when Trump was asked point blank during the presidential campaign whether it was true he wanted to be a dictator on “Day One” of his new administration, and he answered that he only wanted to be a dictator for one day?
“I only want to be a dictator for one day. And I’m gonna close the borders, and drill, baby drill. And after that, I never want to be a dictator.”
Query: Has any dictator ever voluntarily given up dictatorial powers after just one day? Asking for a friend.
Trump also disavowed any knowledge of or involvement with Project 2025, which was and is the roadmap for his fascist takeover of the levers of government. Did anyone really believe him?
This doesn’t even take into account the unfettered slashing and burning of the federal bureaucracy being led by Special Advisor/Co-President Elon Musk.
There Are No Guardrails
Under Trump 2.0, there is no General Mark Milley, who reminded us — a week after Trump suggested Milley should be killed — that in the United States, members of the military don’t take an oath to a king or a tyrant or a dictator, they take an oath to the Constitution.
There is no John Kelly — a former Marine general who served as Chief of Staff and, earlier, Secretary of Homeland Security in Trump 1.0 — who told the New York Times that Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of the rule of law.
There are no Inspectors General in federal agencies acting as watchdogs, because Trump has fired them.
And there is no Liz Cheney in Congress, willing to risk her career and her reputation as a right-wing stalwart in order to speak out against a member of her own party who she rightfully feared would be a grave danger to the future of the country. She warned that “[t]he people that stopped [Trump] from his worst desires last time around won’t serve again.”
Now we are on the verge of seeing whether the last guardrail — the judicial branch of government — will stay in place. We’ve already seen that Congress has capitulated. If the courts can’t hold him back (and will they do so, when the Supreme Court has already ruled the president has immunity for official acts?), then who or what is left to hold him back?
As Liz Cheney also said:
“Donald Trump believes he will be immune for anything he does once he’s in office. He will not respect the rulings of our courts, and people have to realize our courts can’t enforce their own rulings…. [I]f a president refuses to carry out his obligation to do so, then we are no longer a nation of laws.”
The Third Reich Was Legal, Too
If there are no more checks and balances, of what use is the law at all? After all, much of what the Nazis did in Germany was legal. Immoral and evil, yes, but also legal because the regime changed the laws to legalize their barbarity.
Just within the last few days, the Trump administration arrested a foreign graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, and detained him pending deportation, showing no judicial arrest warrant and leveling no charges against him.
Soon thereafter, the Department of Homeland Security filed a notice setting out the “charges.” Citing Section 237(a)(6)(c)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is charged that Khalil is removable from the United States because “the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse policy consequences for the United States.”
This is very broad language, dating back to the McCarthy era in the 1950s, that basically would allow someone to be deported on the Secretary of State’s say-so. (Read the great analysis by Austin Kocher, listed in the links below, to dig into this in more detail.)
Just within the last few days, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to “legalize” the deportation of a group of Venezuelan nationals without any due process. When a federal judge issued an order haltering their deportation pending further court hearings, Trump’s people put the Venezuelans on a plane anyway. When the judge ordered that any deportation planes already in the air be turned around, the administration ignored the order.
In 1933, the German Reichstag (parliament) passed a law that Hitler had proposed called the Enabling Law (the Ermächtigungsgesetz in German). The law gave Hitler the power to rule by decree, essentially legalizing dictatorial rule.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Nazis’ persecution of Jews was also “legal.”
The misuse of existing laws and the creation of new ones allowed the Nazis to “legally” do what they did. That is what we are now seeing in the United States of America.
First they came for the immigrants….
Links:
Exclusive: How the White House ignored a judge's order to turn back deportation flights (Marc Caputo, Axios, 3/16/25)
With deportation flights to El Salvador, Trump may have defied a judge’s order (Mattathias Schwartz, NY Times, 3/16/25)
Your Introduction to Mahmoud Khalil’s Deportation Case and the Legal Battle Ahead (
, 3/13/25)Law from the 1950s may play role in Columbia University student deportation case (Scott Bomboy, National Constitution Center, 3/12/25)
The Nuremberg Laws: Archives Receives Original Nazi Documents That “Legalized” Persecution of Jews (Greg Bradsher, Prologue Magazine, National Archives, Winter 2010) [← Read this one before the government takes it down from the National Archives website.]