Gauging the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

Just how seriously are we supposed to take Donald Trump?

It’s been the central question of these past several years: whether Trump is tragedy or farce or some hideous combination of each. He talks like a dictator, acts like a mafia boss, and is straight out of central casting for the strongman who often emerges as democracies decline. But is he actually one? Or is this all cosplay? Since it is more likely than not that he is going to be president next January, it may be time to think this through one more time.

Here is, roughly, the case for taking him less seriously as a threat this time than in 2016. Looking back at my essay on the threat of tyranny eight years ago, I think the core analysis of democratic decline holds up, as does my diagnosis of Trump’s deranged psyche. But it behooves me to note that the specific Trump promises I found most alarmingly authoritarian were the following: his pledge to round up and deport all 11 million illegal immigrants; a ban on all Muslim immigrants; death threats to his political opponents; prosecution of Hillary Clinton; and a pledge to legalize torture in US warfare.

After four years in office, these fears — apart from the persistent rhetorical menacing of his opponents — were not borne out. He was bluffing, it turns out. On all the most substantive, authoritarian promises, he caved.

I also worried in that essay about some kind of national emergency that Trump could abuse to expand his power. One did actually occur on Trump’s watch: Covid. But his actual response was to expedite a vaccine, appoint Tony Fauci, and bitch, moan, pontificate absurdly, and dither. What Trump didn’t do was seize total power and assume all the weapons a national emergency could offer. A wannabe dictator would have jumped at the chance (see Trudeau, Justin).

I was also worried about a massive federal over-reaction after riots or urban unrest. Those fears were not absurd: when rioting did break out in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, Trump vowed to respond: “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

But the military did not intervene; looters were largely left alone or even celebrated by the woke left; several cities burned for days, even weeks. Even the most dramatic apparent example of Trump’s authoritarian bent — the clearing of Lafayette Square during the riots of 2020 — turned out to be a nothingburger. An internal report found that the reason the cops moved the Lafayette crowd was “so a contractor could install fencing.” Oh, and remember that massive military parade from Trump that was supposed to celebrate July 4 and turn us into a banana republic? Me neither. He conspicuously decided not to prosecute Clinton, despite “Lock Her Up” being a mainstay of his campaign. So I doubt he is really going to preside over the execution of General Mark Milley.

The two areas where Trump acted as badly as I feared were in defending himself from various legitimate investigations, where he revealed his contempt for the rule of law, even when it (partially) exonerated him; and his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he had telegraphed in advance. But notice what these two deeply anti-democratic actions had in common: they were not ways to impose his actual power on anyone; they were designed solely to protect his ego, to ensure he could never be seen as having lost. His narcissism is so extreme that he would sacrifice the entire republic just to sustain his own vision of being The Greatest of All Presidents.

January 6 brings all this together. Did he seriously think he was going to prevent certification, and remain as president? Seriously? Was it a genuine insurrection — an attempted coup, supported by a plurality in the country, secretly backed by rogue elements in the military and a majority in the Congress and the Court — that could have kept Trump in power? Or was it a coordinated but bizarre riot that got out of control, to support a coup based on a theory concocted by a bunch of fringe nutters, with no serious support from any other relevant actor?

To be honest, I think it’s somewhere in the middle of the two: a grotesque, disqualifying outrage against our democracy, and yet also pathetic, lame, and driven by Trump’s psychotic egotism — and cowardice. His decision not to march to the Capitol, despite promising to do so, is classic Trump. He’s a wimp, can’t deal with actual confrontation, fires people over Twitter, dodges primary debates, stays in his safe space of Truth Social, and will back down if you keep calling his bluff.

I know, I know. These reflections do not mean Trump is not a threat to democratic norms and legitimacy. You could buy all this and still regard him as utterly unfit for the office he held. I still do. In fact, there’s also a case for taking his danger to liberal democracy more seriously this time around than in 2016. As Jeff Greenfield explained in last week’s Dishcast, Trump has learned a few things since he was first elected, has actually consolidated his staggeringly strong grip on the Republican base and opportunistic elements of the elite, now knows where the weak spots in our constitutional system are, and will keep breaking the law in office (he can’t help himself) and thereby wreck what’s left of our democratic legitimacy, common discourse, and trust in the legal system.

He would essentially end the post-Watergate Justice Department, turning it into a personal revenge machine. He has effectively remade the Supreme Court. He has some serious wonks prepping the ideologues who are supposed to re-capture the bureaucracy from the current civil servants; his highly effective primary campaign is a sign of the professionalism that could conceivably inhabit a second Trump administration; and a victory in 2024 would provide a more decisive mandate than his first campaign — which was chaotic and improvised. That’s especially the case if Trump wins decisively, as is perfectly possible. And God knows what an emboldened, vengeful Trump would look like, with a more organized and unified GOP behind him.

My only cavil with this take is that I doubt professionalism of any kind will ever accompany a Trump administration — first or second term. That would require someone other than a manic psycho at the helm, and a bench of administrative talent that simply isn’t there. I’ve come to see Trump’s tyranny as psychological more than political, because he has neither the discipline nor the will to become a full-fledged strongman. He has the attention span of a TikTok tweenie. It’s far too much work to rule everyone’s lives — or build a wall — when all Trump really needs is constant adulation, and a constant feedback loop of himself “winning” on cable news. We’ve also discovered that he lacks a core feature for every tyrant: he doesn’t seem interested in launching wars. He even seems averse to them — unlike his GOP rival, the ghastly Nikki Haley, who makes Bill Kristol look like Pat Buchanan.

My fear of a second Trump term is thereby less crippling than my terror at the prospect of the first — because he seeks power only for his own psychological needs, because he is inherently incompetent, and because, at heart, he is a coward. And then there’s the question of his obvious trolling. What, for example, are we supposed to make of his bizarre statement that he intended to be a “dictator on Day One”? It was a joke! When asked to explain it, he said he meant he would “close the border” and “drill, baby, drill” on his first day in office and then act constitutionally. Neither of those requires dictatorial power, of course, and all of it was a comic trolling of Sean Hannity. It’s insane, of course, that we had a president who says things just to get a rise out of people. But it’s not the same as Hitlerian doggerel.

Of course, it’s a crisis that a mature democracy should be entertaining a candidate this dangerous, this unstable, and this malevolent. The very idea that we should be worried about any elected official effectively ending the rule of law, refusing to leave office, open to deploying violence on his behalf, and capable of daily, hourly, outbursts worthy of a mafia boss is a sign of how deep the rot has gone.

It’s going to be extremely hard for me to vote for Biden again this fall, given his appalling record on immigration, his aggressive race and sex discrimination, and his support for transing children. But Trump is not just a despicable human being. He is a completely unpredictable violator of constitutional and democratic norms. Even if he did fail to deliver on many of his authoritarian threats in his first term, that doesn’t mean we can be sure he won’t in his second. He may not be a new Mussolini, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t way outside the line for responsible government.

One final thing. Trump’s inability to concede an iota to his opponents, his fusion of truth and lies so that truth disappears entirely, and his daily doses of ever-intensifying polarization deeply corrode our liberal democracy. He has empowered the far left, because the moderate Democrats fear that any resistance to the woke will be tarred as being in league with Trump, thereby accelerating our descent into democratic dysfunction.

His demagogic genius is very real. He may be the most talented thug in American political history, which makes him ineluctably the most dangerous. And tyrants rarely mellow with time; their gambles tend to grow in ambition. And a victory for him would not just mean a threat to the rule of law; it would mean a democratic mandate for a president outside the law, and beyond morality. It would make the deep stain of 2016 permanent. It’s unthinkable.

Jonathan writes a column for The Guardian, hosts their “Politics Weekly America” podcast, and is the co-host of the “Unholy” podcast with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He’s also the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on “white supremacy” shifting to “Jewish supremacy,” and a character study of Keir Starmer. That link also takes you to commentary on our episode with Jeff Greenfield on Trump and political history. Readers also discuss my essay on Saltburn and my sparring with Ari Melber on Real Time last Friday.

I don’t participate on Twitter, aka X, anymore. I gave it up last year because it brought out the worst in me, and did nothing to generate traffic for the Dish. But I still peruse it for stories I might miss, controversies that might add some light to some issue, and Pet Shop Boys updates.

This week has seen an epic fight between Steve Sailer and Will Stancil, on the mounds of data showing persistent, non-trivial gaps in IQ among various racial groups. As usual, we got far, far more heat than light on the question (some of it amusing), but also some interesting dynamics. At its root, Sailer keeps offering data, and Stancil keeps up the ritual denunciation of anyone even interested in the topic. To pick one of many Stancil slurs de haut en bas:

Sailer, Hanania, all of them, they’re gutter racist scum, they have labored for years to restore discredited and dangerous racist ideologies to the heart of politics, they are driven by inner contempt for nonwhite people, especially black people. Do not speak to them respectfully.

The invective is necessary because Sailer has been knee-deep in all this for decades and so has a better command of the data; but Stancil doesn’t really rebut or refute the data. He waves it away; or declares it “decades old and heavily debunked,” which, alas, it isn’t; and refers to “closing gaps” without any evidence to back him up. But, beneath the bluster, he also kind of accepts it:

No one doubts that racial gaps emerge in many measures, just like gaps emerge between many different populations. The question is “is race the cause of these gaps” and to that question, this summary data provides NO EVIDENCE.

This is helpful. The key debate is not whether such gaps exist — they do, no-one doubts it, some have narrowed a little but the core gaps remain — but why they exist. And we’re told to choose between two options: that this is entirely due to genetics or entirely due to the environment. Stancil likes this formulation because it permits him to describe any student of racial differences as a member of the Klan, period, which gives left-Twitter the usual chubby. Here’s the straw man Stancil bravely fights against, supported only by an army of snapping fingers:

Okay, I am Officially Disputing the argument that all the major disparities and differences between black and white people are genetic in nature or a product of black people’s biological inferiority. My bold stand is that Nazis, confederates, and Klan were factually wrong.

Who actually believes this? No serious person. The question has always been rather: how much of the gap may be due to genetics and how much to the environment?

We don’t know for sure, but it’s almost certainly a very complex mix of the two, and may well involve not just both, but the interaction of genetics with environment at various points in life, especially in early childhood. This makes it much like every other human trait. Sailer doesn’t believe that genetics explains all of it; but Stancil emphatically insists on the circular Kendi doctrine:

All that matters is that the social system be explained by racism and that the racism be reinforced by the social system. [Race science is] like believing your crops died because of witches, and believing in witches because your crops died. A perfect loop of stupidity.

For Stancil, and for many on the pomo left, human nature is a total blank slate. Literally everything you are is determined by “the social system,” and if the “social system” is “systemic racism,” then all racial gaps are due to race discrimination. (It’s telling that Stancil never mentions the white-Asian gap, which would complicate his notion that this is all driven by KKK racism.) This is as dumb and as crude as the idea that race differences are entirely a function of genes.

It’s the same leftist denial of nature and biology that fuels the trans debate, by the way. The “social system” of the gender binary is the only factor in human sex, and biology is irrelevant. That’s why you’ll never get a class on hormones in a Gender Studies course and why “trans women are women” is, for post-modern leftists, self-evident. Biology doesn’t exist as a factor in understanding human behavior. Everything is socialized. That big dick you see swinging between my legs? It says nothing about whether I am male or female. It’s a social construction! Even my chocolate salty balls!

This is as laughable an idea for race as it is for sex. It can only be sustained by a massive campaign to demonize and suppress any inquiry into it — which Stancil, a classic “Good White Man” in the left-Twitter zoo, does with gusto and persistence. He cannot debate the data so he demonizes the people who present it. Even to enter the debate would be to give it credibility, and so the only option is to let it rip:

however stupid you think scientific racists are, they always manage to much, much dumber than that

At some point the left will realize that calling everyone who disagrees with you stupid is not an actual strategy for winning an argument. Its only point, as Freddie reminded us, is to advance the social status of Good White Man Stancil among his woke peers.

Seattle, Washington, 4.20 pm

“Trump called Ron DeSantis a pedophile. Ron endorsed him. Trump demeaned Ted Cruz’s wife. Ted endorsed him. … The GOP is plagued by weak men with no shame,” – Joshua Reed Eakle.

“We all agree on the need to better secure the border … we simply can not allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people … who are waiting lawfully,” – Barack Obama, 2005.

“After 60 years of failing to end intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, and intergenerational illiteracy in my community, the DEI folks have decided to lower America down to our level — right at the moment when we’re trying to get out of it,” – Corey Brooks, a pastor on Chicago’s South Side.

“We coach ball; we don’t look at color. … I think the minute you guys stop making a big deal about [race], everybody else will as well,” – Todd Bowles, coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to reporters.

“Checking my cellphone bill the other day, I found myself wondering just how many Nazis use the same service as me. Probably hundreds, since I use one of the three biggest cell providers in the country. What were the ethics, I wondered, of paying a company that was being used to spread hate?” – Megan McArdle, on the absurdity of “Nazis on Substack.”

“You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion, you can get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on,” – Donald Trump in The Art of the Deal.

We didn’t get any dissents over my essay on Saltburn and Oxford, but a reader writes:

“Carey Mulligan gives us something between an episode of Absolutely Fabulous and a Richard Burton flick.” Do you mean Tim Burton and his wild-haired oddballs? (And I love Richard — yes, I am very old.)

Yes. Tim! I meant Tim! A brain-fart. Thanks for the correction. As always, keep them — and the dissents — coming: [email protected].

Thankfully I missed last week’s bitter cold snap in DC — but this one’s beautiful:

• Joe Klein is numb after New Hampshire. Mike Murphy doubts Haley can win her home state. DeSantis slinks back to his.


• A lifelong liberal misses the old GOP: “they didn’t value responsibility; they obsessed over it.”


• Alex Massie fisks Boris’ endorsement of Trump.


• Barro addresses the apathy factor for a Biden-Trump redux.


• Erickson says “the biggest story happening right now” is the 5-4 ruling by SCOTUS backing Biden over Texas barbed wire. Coulter is pissed. Is Trump headed for the border?


• Black Democrats are suing Chicago over the migrant crisis.


• US troops in Iraq and Syria are under frequent attack — and it’s escalating.


• The lab-leak theory gets ever closer to reality.


• Are the feds getting close to removing cannabis from Schedule I?


• Who is more guilty of “book banning” — the right or the left?


• “Fears of the Old Boys’ Club are now doing more harm than good,” argues Richard Reeves.


• Growing up poor is better than having an unstable family.


• Paul Taylor has a series on the arbitrary nature of racial classification by the feds.


• Ban the Benjamin?


• Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork are kaput, and the LA Times is flailing, but “the long tail of media is thriving,” observes Simon Owens. The Dish sure is.

Where do you think? Email your entry to [email protected]. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.