Trump Wasn’t a Dictator, but He Played One on TV
MY FELLOW AMERICANS, our long National Infrastructure Week is over. The whole thing’s been exhausting: a four-year assault on the sensibilities and senses at a relentless death-metal pace. Every day brought a new enormity, from that uncomfortably Freudian spat with Kim Jong Un about whose “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” to the eerie “I’m meltinggg!” rants about voter fraud near the end. Midway through Donald J. Trump’s tenure, in a desperate attempt at self-care, I moved my iPhone from nightstand to dresser—just to delay my what-fresh-hell-is-this early morning scan of the president’s Twitter feed until I was actually upright.
But was it all as radically disjunctive as it felt? Humor me: Try, if you can, to mentally mute @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter feed; conjure up a President Trump who in his public conduct is as impeccably boring as Vice President Mike Pence. Thus limited to concrete actions taken and new powers seized, you might be able to make out something that looks closer to a bog-standard version of the imperial presidency—not quite as “not normal” as the Trump presidency seemed.
America’s “thought leaders” find that notion unthinkable. Trump is “the closest we have ever come to a dictator,” declares former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The mere prospect of 45’s reelection “poses the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War,” the New York Times editorial board insisted as Election Day loomed. Trump “stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” the Gray Lady gasped, having “outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.”
It’s usually a mistake to reach for historical superlatives about a presidency we’ve barely finished living through. Even so, I could entertain a couple for our newly departed 45th: “least competent” or “most rhetorically unhinged.”
But the closest we’ve ever come to a dictator? C’mon, man. Contemplate the Four Seasons Total Landscaping incident four days after the election. Aiming to schedule a key press conference about
