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A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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politics
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Quite honestly, I go back and forth on whether a Trump second term would result in a dictatorship. Don't get me wrong, he would do immense damage to our democracy and should be kept as far away from power as possible. (Preferably in a prison cell.)
Trump's first term, though, showed that Trump was often too incompetent to fulfill what he wanted to do. Not only that, but he was prone to get distracted by shiny things. He's going to go after the "deep state" and kick out anyone who doesn't support him? Well, first he needs to hold a press conference with a hurricane map that he marked up with a sharpie.
All this being said, the best case scenario for a Trump second term is that democracy is seriously wounded. We could emerge from it still with our voting rights intact, but with our entire democracy vulnerable to the next guy who can con a group of people into thinking that he's protecting them from The Other by removing everyone's rights.
There is a bluprint out there in the open :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Some people are seriously planning to take down US democracy...
Seems like a good reason for the party to adapt in order to secure as much participation from as many likeminded voters as possible.
"Not Trump" is not as universally convincing as I fear the party is assuming. It's sufficient for you and I, to be sure.
Right. I didn't address this in my comment because I wanted to focus on Trump himself. Whatever Trump does, he'll likely use this plan to destroy our democracy.
If Trump gets into office again, our best hope would be that 1) the institutions can survive Project 2025 and 2) Trump and Co are too incompetent to enact their plans. I wouldn't want to bet my life on either of these, though. A better hope is to work to keep Trump (and anyone else like him) away from any position of power all the way from President to city councilman.
Reagan started to get in to ideas of unitary executive theory and Bush was another proponent. The founders often debated, famously Hamilton, what the "executive" role actually meant for the office, and it was left vague as a lot of their ideas were. In the context of the time you had landowners being allowed to vote, the whole point of the government was basically to ensure no states had power over any other, then over time the executive branch developed and expanded and presidents had to see what that meant testing limits over time. I don't think this plan would be successful and if it were it would probably be bad by virtue of who would be in power.
Landowning was never a requirement on the federal level in the US. It was allowed to be a requirement for the states for a little while, few states bothered and the ones that did gave it up.
Look in to the men's suffrage movement, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky were the only three states to have full adult suffrage for white males before 1800.
18th century property qualifications:
Connecticut: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
Delaware: fifty acres of land (twelve under cultivation) or £40 of personal property
Georgia: fifty acres of land
Maryland: fifty acres of land and £40 personal property
Massachusetts Bay: an estate worth 40 shillings annually or £40 of personal property
New Hampshire: £50 of personal property
New Jersey: one-hundred acres of land, or real estate or personal property £50
New York: £40 of personal property or ownership of land
North Carolina: fifty acres of land
Pennsylvania: fifty acres of land or £50 of personal property
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: personal property worth £40 or yielding 50 shillings annually
South Carolina: one-hundred acres of land on which taxes were paid; or a town house or lot worth £60 on which taxes were paid; or payment of 10 shillings in taxes
Virginia: fifty acres of vacant land, twenty-fives acres of cultivated land, and a house twelve feet by twelve feet; or a town lot and a house twelve feet by twelve