‘I’d Rather Have A Dictator’: Trump’s Been Outing Himself A Lot Lately
President is working overtime to normalize his authoritarianism
Donald Trump seems to be coming out a lot lately.
The Republican increasingly is a lot more open about his desire to be an American dictator, and he’s less coy about his authoritarianism than he ever was.
Trump’s used the actual word “dictator” several times in recent days, and has explicitly declared that he has “the right to do anything I want to do” as president.
Trump’s entire second term has been predicated on authoritarianism, as he has put forward policies — from his campaign of mass deportation, to the criminalization of homelessness and his militarization of US cities, and much more — by his prolific use of executive orders rather than democratically approved legislation.
He’s signed nearly 200 executive orders and signed just a handful of bills in the months since he returned to the White House.
Now that he’s deploying US troops in more American cities, he’s being much more open about his authoritarianism.
Trump said Monday that he thinks Americans may like a “dictator,” though he wouldn’t describe himself as one.
“They say: ‘We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom, he’s a dictator, he’s a dictator,’” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
The next day, during a three-hour Cabinet meeting, Trump said: “‘Trump is a dictator’ — most people say, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.”
Also Tuesday — in the face of impassioned opposition by the Democratic governor of Illinois — he also insisted that he could deploy the National Guard in Chicago, saying, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it, no problem going in and solving, you know, [the governor’s] difficulties.”
Trump’s focus on crime is misleading, at best, as crime already was down in Washington DC when he militarized the nation’s capital a few weeks ago.
And this week’s united stand in Chicago —of Illinois Gov JB Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Chicago city leaders — was meant to demonstrate that there’s no appetite for Trump’s authoritarianism there.
Tim Miller, a prominent political commentator with The Bulwark website, described Trump’s public talk about a dictator as a “dictatorship trial balloon.”
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