Give Donald Trump this much: He has never tried to hide his malice, his lawlessness, or his desire to inflict pain on others. These were on vivid display when he engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stood by as a mob of supporters sought to hang his vice president. These were displayed, as well, every day during his 2024 vengeance campaign. Yet more than 77 million Americans decided that he was the man with whom they wanted to entrust the care of this nation.
For more Americans than not, and for many more evangelical Christians than not, Trump is the representative man of our time. His ethic is theirs. So are his corruptions. And for those of us who, in our younger years, revered America as a shining city upon a hill, a nation of nations, the “last, best hope of earth,” this is quite a painful period. America has lost its moral bearings; as a result, it has also lost its moral standing in the world.
A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation. And it’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots.
Trump is in the process of building his own paramilitary force. He is invoking wartime powers to deport people without due process, even suggesting that American citizens may be sent to foreign prisons. He has deployed National Guard troops to cities over the objections of local officials. In a speech to American troops in Japan, he warned: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.”
Trump has signaled that he is open to invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to deploy the military in the United States. And he has claimed, without legal justification, that he has the right to order the military to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America. (The administration has yet to provide evidence to support its claims that the individuals who have been killed were cartel members or that the vessels were transporting drugs.)
My colleague Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College, warns that eventually what Trump is doing will become a new principle for the use of force: “He is acclimating people to the notion that the military is his private army, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by norms, unconstrained by American traditions.”
Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the senior judge advocates general, removing the officials who could obstruct the execution of unlawful orders from the commander in chief. Their dismissals will also have a chilling effect on those who remain. The firing of the JAGs is just one element of a broader purge of the military, which started at the beginning of Trump’s second term. In February, five former defense secretaries, including James Mattis, who served under Trump in his first term, wrote a letter to lawmakers, saying the dismissals “raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power.”
Speaking of which: Trump views himself as the final arbiter of the legality of anything he does. An executive order he signed in February says, “The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law.”
There’s more. Trump is the most corrupt and self-enriching president ever. He is also conducting what The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg describes as “the most punishing government crackdown against major American media institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.” That includes suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the licenses of television broadcasters that give him too much “bad publicity” and suing major newspapers and networks.
He has targeted law firms for political reasons and universities for ideological reasons. As part of his disinformation campaign, he fired the nonpartisan commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported weaker-than-expected jobs numbers for July. He has called judges who rule against him “lunatics” and “monsters who want our country to go to hell.” And he granted blanket clemency to the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including members of extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Trump has pressured the Department of Justice to target, indict, and destroy those he considers to be his political enemies. And he signed memorandums targeting two officials from his first term, including Chris Krebs, the former cybersecurity official who rejected Trump’s false claim of widespread election fraud.
As for free elections, the cornerstone of democracy, the Trump administration is using the levers of government to target “the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world,” The New York Times reports. Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform. He has also said he’s going to “lead a movement” to outlaw electronic-voting machines and mail-in balloting, in an effort to disadvantage Democrats. Cleta Mitchell, who played a role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, threatens that Trump could declare a national emergency to take control of national elections. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham warns that Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already well under way. “The insurrection failed the first time,” Graham writes, “but the second try might be more effective.”
Trump, having attempted to overthrow one election, can be counted on to attempt to rig the next one. As J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, warns in The Atlantic: “With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.”
Trump learned from his first term; in his second go-around, he’s placed MAGA cultists in every key position of power. They will follow Trump to the ends of the Earth, knowing that a presidential pardon is there for the asking, if necessary.
There’s little indication that the central institutions of American life, including the Supreme Court, are willing to check Trump as he seeks unprecedented and nearly unlimited power. Nor is it clear that if they tried to do so, they would succeed. Trump has so far largely abided by court decisions, but beyond a certain point, on things he really cares about, he’ll likely ignore them. He will ask about Chief Justice John Roberts a variation of the question Joseph Stalin is supposed to have asked about the pope: How many divisions does he have?
We’re less than one-fifth of the way through Trump’s second term; things will get much worse. So it’s too early to know whether the damage that Trump and his MAGA movement are inflicting on the foundations of the United States is reversible, or whether the injury to our civic and political culture is repairable.
If America recovers, the path will lie not simply through electoral politics. The fate of the country rests on the recovery of republican virtue, the cultivation of an active passion for the public interest, and a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. Words and phrases such as honor and love of country have to stir people out of their lethargy and into action.
We saw some of that in the “No Kings” protests, but much more needs to happen. My colleague David Brooks, citing the work of the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, reminds us that “citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.” Whether we step up or not is a matter of civic will and civic courage. Can we summon those virtues at a moment when American ideals are under sustained assault by the American president?
A final thought: As we continue along this journey, into places none of us has ever quite been before, it is worth holding close to our hearts the words of the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel. They moved me when I first read them, in the early 1990s, when so much was so different, and I have cited them several times since, but they hold more meaning now than ever.
“I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
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