10/31/2024
"Attacks on democracy are different. If democracy breaks down, the political system can lose the ability to self-correct."
By David Leonhardt
Good morning. We’re covering Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies
Not a rerun
Donald Trump has shown more hostility to American democracy than any other president in the country’s history. He tried to overturn an election result. He celebrates political violence. The list goes on, and it is familiar by now.
A central question about a second Trump term is how this hostility might manifest itself. The country’s political system survived his first term, after all, and many Americans understandably wonder how much different a second term would be.
It really could be different.
Trump is now far better positioned to accomplish his goals, as my colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan have explained in a series of stories. His aides are vetting job candidates for loyalty, trying to exclude establishment Republicans who might resist his wishes. Both Congress and the judiciary would likely be friendlier to him than they were eight years ago.
In today’s newsletter, I want to help you understand the main ways that Trump could undermine democratic traditions. Along the way, I’ll point to Times coverage from the past two years. I will also address some objections that I expect some readers to have.
The dangers
There are at least six major ways Trump could weaken American democracy:
1. Prosecute critics. Trump has promised to use the Justice Department to punish his political opponents if he is president again, including with “long term prison sentences,” as he wrote online.
Presidents have traditionally not inserted themselves into criminal cases. But that has been a choice; a president has the power to issue orders to the Justice Department. In his first term, Trump demanded investigations of at least 10 people, sometimes damaging their lives, as my colleague Michael Schmidt has documented. Trump could order more investigations in a second term, given his staffing plans. (This graphic lays out how Trump could seek to jail his political opponents.)
2. Silence critics in other ways. Trump may also try to use his regulatory powers to shape public discourse. He has suggested that NBC, MSNBC and CBS deserve to lose their broadcast licenses because of their critical coverage of him. He has talked about punishing Amazon because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.
These comments echo the silencing campaigns that foreign leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India have conducted (as this essay by A.G. Sulzberger, The Times’s publisher, explains).
3. Reward allies and campaign donors. Trump, as The Times has reported, “is sometimes making overt promises about what he will do once he’s in office, a level of explicitness toward individual industries and a handful of billionaires that has rarely been seen in modern presidential politics.” Both the oil and va**ng industries — and perhaps Elon Musk — seem likely to benefit.
4. Replace federal employees with loyalists. Late in his first term, Trump issued an executive order that gave him the power to fire and replace tens of thousands of federal workers, including economists, scientists and national security experts. The order would have vastly increased the number of political appointees, which is now about 4,000. President Biden rescinded the order.
True, there is an argument that such an order promotes democracy by causing the federal work force to reflect the elected president. But the moves may also strip the government of nonpartisan expertise that connects policy with reality. And combined with Trump’s many anti-democratic promises, the wholesale firing of federal employees could allow him to use the government for his personal whims.
5. Undermine previously enacted policies. Rather than trying to repeal laws he opposes, Trump and his allies have suggested that he may simply “impound” funds — effectively ignoring laws that Congress previously passed. One example: He could try to block money for clean energy.
6. Refuse to transfer power peacefully. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, still do not acknowledge that Biden beat Trump in 2020. Trump even vows to pardon some of the rioters who attacked Congress when it was meeting to certify the result on Jan. 6, 2021.
This combination suggests that a transfer of power took place in 2021 only because enough Republicans stood up to Trump. And they may not do so in the future.
Policy isn’t democracy
I know that Trump supporters may ask why we’re not writing a similar newsletter about the Democratic Party. And it’s true that liberals have violated democratic norms at times — with aggressive executive orders, for example, or attempts to stifle debate during the Covid pandemic. But Trump’s anti-democratic behavior is of a different order of magnitude. Pretending otherwise is false balance.
As an example of how different Biden and Trump are, look at Biden’s Justice Department. It has indicted not only prominent Republicans (like Trump) but also prominent Democrats (like Mayor Eric Adams and Senator Robert Menendez), a major Democratic fund-raiser (Sam Bankman-Fried, the now imprisoned crypto executive) and even the president’s son (Hunter Biden).
I also know that some Democrats will argue that the list here is too short and should include Trump’s potential policies on abortion, immigration, climate change and more. But it’s worth distinguishing between policy disputes and democracy itself.
There is nothing inherently anti-democratic about reducing environmental regulations, allowing states to restrict abortion access or deporting people who entered the country illegally. Democrats can make the case that these policies are wrong — and voters can decide who’s right. Voters can also change their minds if the policies don’t succeed.
Attacks on democracy are different. If democracy breaks down, the political system can lose the ability to self-correct.
