Is Donald Trump really serious about being a dictator?

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seen on a screen during the second presidential debate.

Sept. 15, 2024 3 AM PT

One of the pleasures of last week’s presidential debate was watching Vice President Kamala Harris deftly filet former President Trump over his affinity for dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris said. Given a second term, she said, Trump would readily hand Ukraine over to Putin “for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with … a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

In a rambling response, Trump repeated his dubious claim that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine on his watch and added that Putin has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. “And eventually,” Trump said, “maybe he’ll use them.”

He spoke approvingly of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader and a MAGA media darling. I’d like to give you an exact quote, but I could not extract a whole meaningful sentence from Trump’s comments about Orban.

Trump has always flirted with the idea of autocracy. But now that flirtation has become a full-on embrace. He has threatened to weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents, gut the civil service system to replace professional federal employees with loyalists, invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests, reinstitute his ban on Muslim immigration and incarcerate millions of immigrants in detention camps.

If you don’t think he’s serious, you’re in denial.

Trump has already tried to strong-arm state officials into overturning the results of a free and fair election. When that didn’t work, his supporters mounted a deadly assault on the Capitol aimed at stopping the certification of his loss to Joe Biden. Even before all that, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright called Trump “the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.”

And, like most despots or would-be despots, he is sadistic, dismissing those who have given their lives for their country, mocking disabled people, ripping children away from their families.

To say that democracy experts are worried would be an understatement.

“I consider Trump a very serious threat to American democracy,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of numerous books about democracy. “He has repeatedly demonstrated in word and deed that he does not value democracy, does not respect constitutional norms, does not accept the results of democratic elections if he loses and only values the friendship of strongman autocrats like Orban and Putin rather than our democratic allies.”

I met Diamond in July 2019, when Trump was 2½ years into his presidency. He had just published “Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency,” a disturbing look at the retreat of democracy and rise of authoritarians around the world. An entire chapter, titled “The Decline of American Democracy,” is devoted to Trump.

“We can survive sleaze and vulgarity in a president,” Diamond wrote. “We can challenge and reverse bad policies. But the threat that Trump poses to America’s democratic institutions and norms is unprecedented.”

And, Diamond told me Thursday by email from Taiwan, the threat has only grown more serious, especially since the Supreme Court undermined the bedrock American ideal that no one is above the law.

“He is much more unhinged now than he was when he ran in 2016 or 2020, and I truly fear for his potential to abuse presidential power and weaponize it against his opponents,” Diamond wrote, “even more so in light of the recent Supreme Court decision expanding immunity from prosecution for virtually anything a president does in office that can be claimed to be an official act.”

One of the most distressing aspects of Trump’s popularity is his supporters’ willingness to accept a president with unchecked authority.

A February Pew Research Center survey of global opinions about authoritarianism found that about a third of Americans said they would support a system “in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference” from legislators or courts. (Unsurprisingly, that roughly corresponds with the share of Americans who really want a second Trump term.)

Diamond has often said that democracies, with their strong protections for civil liberties and the rule of law, don’t drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, they die slowly, incrementally, poisoned at the roots by the fear and anger instilled by demagogues like Trump.

“They say we lost,” Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week, whining about 2020 as usual. “But we didn’t lose. And we’re never going to let that happen again in this country.”

Pay attention: He’s telling you exactly what he plans to do.

@robinkabcarian