Trump Is This Close to Declaring Himself Dictator for Life
President Donald Trump doesn’t just talk about having monarchical powers, he’s behaving like he already has them.
The $1.776 billion slush fund (gift link) for J6 rioters came from a settlement in which the Justice Department resolved a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS for the illegal release of his tax returns. Trump is all at once the plaintiff with oversight over both the DOJ and the defendant, the IRS. Added to all that, the case isn’t even related to J6. The fund already has people like right-wing extremist and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio drooling.
Whether this is legal is still an open question; whether it is ethical is not. Sending taxpayer dollars to people who stormed the Capitol, attacked police officers, threatened to hang the vice president, and attempted to overturn an election, clearly violates the obligations with which presidents are entrusted.
The conservative National Review editorialized:
This is, de facto, a new government program not authorized by Congress, under the fictional pretense of settling lawsuits that have not been proven in court. The fact that (as Blanche recites) such things have been done in the past by Democrats makes this worse, rather than better. Hard-to-supervise slush funds aimed at financing well-connected political allies are exactly the sort of thing a populist presidency is supposed to end.
Additionally, DOJ posted a one-page document tied to the settlement claiming the IRS “is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from investigating Trump, Trump’s family, or Trump’s companies (all caps in original). This means Trump, Trump family members, and Trump companies can just do whatever they want tax-related and they’ll never be audited or prosecuted. Further, he presumes this authority lasts “FOREVER”!
Indeed, Trump was already behaving like he can do whatever he wants regardless of the law or ethics.
He has made over 3,600 stock trades while president, many involving companies whose fortunes are directly tied to his presidential decision-making.
Trump’s family and company, The Trump Organization, are making business deals that are closely tied to government regulation and foreign policy.
Trump repeatedly “jokes” about staying in office after his second term.
And, he has many times claimed to have sole authority over the government. Jonah Goldberg summarized these remarks in a column for the LA Times:
The president recently said that if China invades Taiwan, he alone will determine whether the U.S. will defend Taiwan. “Me. I’m the only person” who decides. Last summer, Trump told the Atlantic that the difference between his first term and his second was that he didn’t have anyone in his administration to hinder him. This time, “I run the country and the world.” Congress and the courts don’t enter into it.
After Trump unilaterally replaced at gunpoint the president of Venezuela with a pliant satrap, without the approval of Congress, the New York Times asked if there were any limits on his will: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year, we have president engaged in the sort of behavior that led us to declare independence to begin with. In the words of the Declaration, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
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Some More Good Reads
The Dispatch: “The Movement to Revamp Civics”
Today the civics space is divided between two extremes. The critical-utopians, embodied by the authors of the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, hold that America is “a fraudulent project grounded in racism, inequality, and imperialism at home and abroad,” writes Carrese. On the other hand, a defensive-nostalgic school of civics focuses on American triumphs and folklore, “with minor attention to any failings to live up to the Declaration’s principles of the equal natural rights of all humans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” A conservative, Carrese prefers the latter camp, but he believes that civics education must not be understood as belonging to these extremes.
“The idea of America, of We the People, always has been a complex blend of ideas, principles, peoples, and traditions; and of triumphs and failings,” writes Carrese. “It therefore always has been an argument.” While civics education must incorporate debate and discussion at age-appropriate levels—kindergartners, for instance, likely should not be debating the morality of the Three-Fifths Compromise—it should not ignore America’s past moral failings nor paint a rose-colored view of our history. It should also teach students to understand these failings as just that: failures to live up to the ideals upon which this nation was founded.
Carrese believes that the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville’s “reflective patriotism” is a model for contemporary civic educators to follow. Tocqueville observed that Americans combine “sentiment with argument and questioning,” loving the people and soil they belonged to while also loving the ideals upon which their nation was founded. In other words, Americans of yore loved America because she was creedal—dedicated to human equality—and because she was their country, teeming with people they loved and land they esteemed. This sort of patriotism requires that educators pass on certain virtues to the rising generation of Americans, such as civil disagreement, civic friendship, and reflective patriotism itself. Opting for either the total deconstruction of the American project or an overly simplistic, nostalgic understanding of our past are roads to ignorance or national divorce.
The Atlantic: “A Department of Justice for an Age of Conspiracy Theories”
DOJ is now very much an active participant in today’s conspiracy-theory ecosystem. On X, official DOJ accounts and those of the department’s leaders produce a steady stream of images, clips, and one-liners in the apparent hope of drawing in MAGA influencers. These posts, light on facts and heavy on exaggeration and outrage, echo far-fetched ideas already popular on the right and help seed new narratives—part of a give-and-take relationship in which DOJ both feeds and responds to conspiracy theories.
KPBS: “Experts: Mosque shooters followed familiar path of far-right radicalization”
Both suspects appear to have contributed to the manifesto. In it they blame Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, women, the LGBTQ+ community and the left for seeking to destroy white culture.
They also repeat the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory which says there’s a conspiracy to bring in nonwhite immigrants to end the country’s white demographic majority.
Some conservatives have helped mainstream the theory, including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
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