As Donald Trump asserts more and more control of the government, overriding Congress, unleashing a flood of executive orders overturning long-time precedents and militarizing Washington, D.C., with threats to do the same to cities run by Democrats, he has also fallen back on proposing a dictatorship during his press conferences.
According to Salon political analyst Heather Digby Parton, it is no coincidence that the president is musing about becoming a dictator at the same time that he is seeing how far he can indulge his authoritarian impulses before Congress and the public have had enough.
In a column on Friday, Parton wrote that, if there is one thing that the president has learned between his first stint in the Oval Office and his current occupation, it is that he can make outrageous comments repeatedly to the point where the press and voters become numb –– and then he proceeds to go ahead with his plans with little resistance.
As she wrote, a Republican president musing about becoming a dictator is nothing new, noting that President George W. Bush once said, after meeting with congressional leaders, “I told [them] that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — just so long as I’m the dictator.”
She also noted disgraced President Richard Nixon made similar rumblings before he was forced to resign.
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While that might have been a joke to Bush, and less so to Nixon, Trump’s comments seem more like a actual proposal, according to the analyst.
Pointing to Trump saying in 2019, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” she noted his comments have become increasingly more alarming. “Since he believes he has unlimited power to do anything he chooses, it’s pretty clear that he is open to entertaining the notion,” Parton wrote before adding, “As he said on Tuesday during a Cabinet Meeting, ‘I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.’”
Calling that comment the words of a dictator, the columnist wrote, “Trump is raising the prospect of a dictatorship over and over again to normalize it, to make it something from which the American people will no longer recoil — and that it’s accepted and even supported by many Americans,” adding that a recent report from CNN demonstrated his avid followers are “increasingly in favor of dictatorship — as long as he is the dictator.”
“In the meantime, even if he’s not quite embracing the term itself, the president is behaving like a dictator. And so far, he’s getting away with it. Trump is crude and ignorant about virtually everything, but on some instinctive level he understands that the Republican Party has been laying the groundwork for this since Nixon first tested the waters back in the early 1970s,” Parton wrote before concluding, “Now, Trump senses an opening — and he is going for it.”
You can read more here.